This time of year sees lovers of literature wading through endless lists of “summer reads” – and sitting atop many of them is Home Fire, the critically acclaimed latest novel from author Kamila Shamsie. Longlisted for the Booker and very recent winner of the Women’s Prize For Fiction, this short book is ideally suited to being read in a scorching heatwave: it’s an uncomfortable, unblinking, powerful read that will leave your mind racing – but my goodness, it’s worth your time.

The book follows three British Muslim siblings: Isma, the eldest sister, and twins Aneeka and Parvaiz, as they struggle to reconnect with one another, set against the shadow of politics, radicalisation, unblinking prejudice and unchangeable world events. Right from the off, , it’s clear that this tale has two faces: everyone seems to be going along with the status quo, or with the routes they see as inevitable, while also silently burning with white-hot frustration and fury at the situations they’ve been placed in. 

Home Fire is a retelling of the Greek tragedy Antigone, and is the first time Kamila had worked on top of an existing story. “All writers are always drawing on other literary texts in some way, but this was the first time I’d done it in such a knowing fashion,” she said. 

The idea to work with this ancient text arrived with Kamila by pure chance. “It was a conversation I had with a man called Jatinder Varma who runs Tara Arts Company in South London. I was between novels, and I wanted something to work on but had no ideas, and I got this email saying: “You don’t know who I am, but come in and have a coffee.’”

Kamila met with Jatinder, who suggested she could write a play – though the writer had no experience with creating a work for the stage, and told him so. “He said ‘I thought you’d say that – so why don’t you adapt a play? Something like Antigone, or The Oresteia, but in a contemporary Asian or British Asian context?’” Kamila had read Antigone at university, but couldn’t recall the tragedy besides (as in all Greek tragedies) that terrible things happened, so looked at the text with fresh eyes. “I was reading the play,” she said, “and it was at that moment when the newspapers were full of stories of young Brits going off to join Isis, and Theresa May, then Home Secretary, was stripping them of their citizenship. And I thought – this [Antigone] is this story. I didn’t have to work to think how it would become contemporary – I just knew.” 

What started life as a play quickly became a book, retaining the five-act structure of traditional theatre to frame the tragic events, with each act seeing a different narrator pick up events from their perspective. “I was surprised how little of Antigone I had to throw away. That central line was just extraordinarily relevant. Right now, Antigone is the most performed play in the world, and I can see why: this figure of resistance to authority… the more we see of our democracy sliding into dark and awful things, the more we need Antigone to turn up and say ‘We’re going to stop this from happening.””

The book unsettles because of how close it skims to the bone on many fronts: primarily the parallels between Home Fire’s fictional Home Secretary Karamat Lone, and Sajid Javid – who rose to the same position after Home Fire’s publication in 2016, and who shares Conservative politics and a Pakistani-Muslim heritage with Shamsie’s character. 

“When I first started to think about a Muslim Home Secretary, I wondered if anyone would buy it,” she said. “But then it was late 2014, and we had Sajid Javid, Sadiq Khan and Sayeeda Warsi, and they were all figures who could go further,” she said. “By the time I was finishing the first draft, the Zac Goldsmith and Sadiq Khan mayoral contest was going on – so when the book came out, everyone asked me if [Lone] was Sadiq Khan: but he was in the wrong role. I remember that moment when Theresa May was about to announce a new Home Secretary, and someone on Twitter wrote “Sajid Javid?” – and I just thought: oh, that’s SO weird. So now I have a deep interest in everything Sajid Javid does, that fall into the category of ‘things my guy would have said’ or ‘things my guy would not have said’!”.

Home Fire is ablaze with secrets: I ask if Kamila is good at keeping them herself, or if they sneak out into her characters. “Different writers have different takes on it: I’ve always felt really queasy about it,” she says. “If I have a conversation with someone and they drop a good line, then I’ll use that, but if there’s something that’s very personal to someone, then I tend to not go off and do things with it.”

The Home Fire siblings grow up in the Preston Road area of London: Kamila has friends who live there, and who walked her around the neighbourhood to get a sense of where the characters lived. “I then had a reading in the Preston Road Community Library, which appears in the book – and a lot of the people who I’d been chatting to before turned up again, so I got to tell them “Oh, I used your line, and your line” and so on.”

Born in Karachi, Pakistan, Kamila grew up in a family of writers stretching to four generations: her mother, grandmother and great grandmother were all published authors, so it seems almost inevitable that at some point Kamila would turn to creating books. “Your own life seems normal to you – at least mine did – and it wasn’t until later that I got to look back and realise how significant it was,” she said. “It wasn’t so much that I was growing up in a family of writers, as it being a family where books mattered, and were taken seriously – but there was never any pressure to [become a writer]. I just loved books from the start. When you grow up and the soundtrack of your life is your mother’s hands on the keyboard… I remember when she gave up her typewriter for a computer and the sounds of my life disappeared – the hammering on keys disappeared.” 

Home Fire is an astonishing read: the complex layers of lies, of secrets, of deceit and subterfuge gradually burn away, until there is nothing left but the siblings themselves, their lives scorched by events whirling well beyond their control. The two short paragraphs of heart-stopping prose that mark the story’s conclusion left me open-mouthed in awe, and are still smouldering awkwardly in my memory long after finishing the book. If you only read one book this summer, make it Home Fire – you won’t regret it.