Home Fire

Home Fire reworks Sophocles’s Antigone through the experience of a British Muslim family. Isma has helped raise her younger twin siblings, Aneeka and Parvaiz, after their mother’s death. Their family history and the pressures surrounding Muslim identity in Britain form the setting for Kamila Shamsie’s novel.

The book considers how personal loyalty and belonging can come into conflict with the demands of the state. Shamsie published Home Fire in 2017 as her seventh novel, and it won the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2018. Its classical source offers a useful point of comparison, but this introduction leaves the family’s later decisions and outcomes undisclosed.