If you are looking for something of high literary quality, and that is completely absorbing, "Home Fire" is the book to read.
It took me halfway through the novel to realize what its gifted author, Kamila Shamsie, was doing--updating Sophocles' "Antigone" to the modern day. Maybe I was so caught up in the tragedy fraught throughout this book that the literary construct eluded me. Clearly, I needed a refresher course in Greek literature.
What was novel to me about "Home Fire" is that the miseries of Muslim terrorism are not visited upon foreign soil, like ours, but within the own Muslim community. Siblings Aneeka, Isma, and twin brother to Aneeka, Parvaiz, who, in a desperate struggle to please a father he never met, and becomes this novel's version of Pasha Antipov from "Doctor Zhivago," are torn apart by the brother's decision, which turns the sisters against each other.
Aneeka believes in the redemption of her twin, and this sets the stage for a romantic alliance with a British diplomat's son, named Eamon, and an indescribable tragedy that is a jolt at the very end, and left me with, book in hand, contemplating such trouble in the world.
Rest assured it is out there. The fires of "Home Fire" are on the very home these people live on. And suffer in. It is emotionally challenging, but worth reading.
Like it says in "At The Ballet," "It wasn't paradise, but it was home."
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