Kamila Shamsie: Home Fire

Thanks also to Dermot O’Flynn for the desk overlooking the sea.

Thank you, Victoria Hobbs, Alexandra Pringle, Becky Saletan, Angelique Tran Van Sang, Jennifer Custer, Faiza S. Khan, and everyone else at Bloomsbury, Riverhead, and A. M. Heath who has played a part in the life of Home Fire .

Thank you to my other publishers, and to my translators.

Thank you also to the translators of Sophocles: Anne Carson’s Antigone (Oberon Books, 2015) and Seamus Heaney’s The Burial at Thebes: Sophocles’ Antigone (Faber & Faber, 2005) were my constant companions as I wrote this novel. I’m also grateful for Ali Smith’s The Story of Antigone (Pushkin Children’s Books, 2013), and for Ali Smith herself.

Thank you to Shami Chakrabarti for permission to use her words, spoken when she was director of Liberty (liberty-human-rights.org.uk), regarding plans to strip British nationals of their citizenship.

Elizabeth Porto remains as trusted an early reader as ever.

The Preston Road sections owe a great deal to Geraldine Cooke — friend, guide, fact-checker — who gave of her time unstintingly without demanding to know what I was up to. My thanks also to her many friends and acquaintances who spoke to me about their neighborhood.

Gillian Slovo’s excellent verbatim play Another World: Losing Our Children to Islamic State (Oberon Books, 2016) was commissioned shortly before I started to write Home Fire . Gillian showed extraordinary generosity and friendship in sharing her knowledge and resources, as well as in her reading of the first draft of this novel.

Kamila Shamsieis the author of several previous novels, including Broken Verses and Burnt Shadows . She has been a finalist for the Orange Prize (twice) and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, among other honors, and has been named one of Granta ’s Best of Young British Novelists and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She was raised in Karachi and lives in London.

In the City by the Sea

Salt and Saffron

Kartography

Broken Verses

Burnt Shadows

A God in Every Stone