Burnt Shadows is an epic narrative beginning on August 9, 1945, in Nagasaki, and ending in a prison cell in the US in 2002. The story unfolds as a man waits to be sent to Guantanamo Bay. At the center of this tale is Hiroko Tanaka, a young woman of twenty-one, deeply in love with her fiancé, Konrad Weiss.

On the fateful day, as Hiroko stands on her veranda, wrapped in a kimono adorned with three black cranes, her world is irrevocably changed by the atomic bomb that obliterates everything she holds dear. All that remains are the bird-shaped burns on her back, a stark reminder of the world she has lost.

In search of new beginnings, Hiroko journeys to Delhi two years later, where her life becomes intertwined with Konrad’s half-sister, Elizabeth, her husband, James Burton, and their employee Sajjad Ashraf, who teaches her Urdu. With the partition of India and the creation of Pakistan, Hiroko finds herself displaced once more, navigating a world where old wars are replaced by new conflicts.

The shadows of history—both personal and political—are cast over the interrelated worlds of the Burtons, the Ashrafs, and the Tanakas. These families are transported from Pakistan to New York and, in the novel’s astonishing climax, to Afghanistan in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. The ties binding these families over decades and generations are tested to the extreme, with unforeseeable consequences.

In this haunting, richly woven novel of modern life in Japan, the author of the acclaimed debut One for Sorrow explores the ties that bind humanity across the deepest divides. Here is a Murakamiesque jewel box of intertwined narratives in which the lives of several strangers are gently linked through love, loss, and fate.

On a train filled with quietly sleeping passengers, a young man’s life is forever altered when he is miraculously seen by a blind man. In a quiet town, an American teacher who has lost her Japanese lover to death begins to lose her own self. On a remote road amid fallow rice fields, four young friends carefully take their own lives—and in that moment they become almost as one.

In a small village, a disaffected American teenager stranded in a strange land discovers compassion after an encounter with an enigmatic red fox, and in Tokyo, a girl named Love learns the deepest lessons about its true meaning from a coma patient lost in dreams of an affair gone wrong.

From the neon colors of Tokyo, with its game centers and karaoke bars, to the bamboo groves and hidden shrines of the countryside, these souls and others mingle, revealing a profound tale of connection—uncovering the love we share without knowing.