Details

ISBN-10: 1937894304
ISBN-13: 9781937894306
Publisher: Atavist Books
Publish Date: 08/05/2014
Dimensions: 8.90" L, 6.00" W, 1.20" H

A God in Every Stone

Paperback

Price: $20.00

Overview

A kaleidoscopic masterpiece of empire and rebellion by Kamila Shamsie, the Orange Prize shortlisted and Granta Best of Young British Novelist

In the summer of 1914 a young Englishwoman, Vivian Rose Spencer, finds herself fulfilling a dream by joining an archeological dig in Turkey. Working alongside Germans and Turks, she falls in love with archaeologist, Tahsin Bey, and joins him in his quest to find an ancient silver circlet. The outbreak of war in Europe brings her idyllic summer to a sudden end, and her friends become her nation’s enemies.

The following spring, in the battlefields of Europe, Qayyum Gul, a Lance Corporal from Peshawar fighting for the British, loses an eye, and is sent to recover in a Royal Pavilion in England, where he slowly begins to doubt his loyalties to the King.

Returning home, Qayyum shares a train carriage with Vivian Rose whose search for the circlet has led her to Peshawar in the heart of the British Raj. Fifteen years later, they will meet again, and their loyalties will be tested once more amidst massacres, cover-ups, and the disappearance of a young man they both love.

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Reviews
Praise for Kamila Shamsie's A God in Every Stone

Stretching from the ancient Persian Empire to the waning days of the British Empire, the novel has an enormous wingspan that catches a wonderful storyteller's wind...beautifully composed, and often terribly moving. –Alan Cheuse, All Things Considered, NPR

"I can't recommend A God in Every Stone by Kamila Shamsie too strongly–this is her best novel yet, which is high praise to give to the author of Burnt Shadows . . . The narrative moves to the struggle for Indian independence and the boy she befriends, against custom of culture and class, in a subtle tapestry in which love, history and archaeology all have their place. Exciting and, in the end, profoundly moving, this will solace you during the grimmest holiday." –Antonia Fraser, author of Marie Antoinette: The Journey, Guardian Summer Reading

"A God in Every Stone has strong storytelling and is a page-turner that is also a literary delight." –Jeanette Winterson, author of Oranges are Not the Only Fruit and The Daylight Gate, Guardian Summer Reading

"It is a magnificent novel: beautiful, terrible, true. Full of passion, life and intelligence, it is redemptive and uncompromising; it goes to the place where life and history meet to reveal them as each other. It reads already like a classic, with a timelessness, a wholeness, as if she just sensed it there at her feet, carefully unearthed it, brushed the soil off it, held it up to the light–and now we all have it. That's how good." –ALI SMITH, author of The Accidental and Hotel World

"A God in Every Stone confirms Kamila Shamsie as a very rare and uniquely rewarding writer. She can brilliantly dramatize conflicts of characters and weave intricate and absorbing plots while also crisply fulfilling the newer, and indeed more formidable, obligations of the contemporary novelist: to set individual destinies in the enlarged and uneven arena of our globalized world." –Pankaj Mishra, author of From the Ruins of Empire and An End to Suffering

"This sixth novel by one of the Granta Best of Young British Novelists, which burns with quiet ferocity in every elegant, measured line, is a book about the echoes through history of loss, betrayal and the human cost of colonialism. . . . Beautifully written, thought provoking . . . Epic." –TINA JACKSON, Metro (London)

"An absolutely wonderful novel... I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if she didn't win some sort of prestigious prize with it." –ANDREAS WHITTAM SMITH, founder and former editor of The Independent, BBC Radio 4, "Saturday Review" (London)

I was absolutely blown away by this book. . . . A stunning novel . . . This is about how social and political forces are bigger than the individual. " –BIDISHA SK MAMATA, journalist for The Guardian and The Huffington Post, and Booker Prize Foundation Trustee, BBC Radio 4, "Saturday Review" (London)

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Details

ISBN-10: 1937894304
ISBN-13: 9781937894306
Publisher: Atavist Books
Publish Date: 08/05/2014
Dimensions: 8.90" L, 6.00" W, 1.20" H
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