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With ENEMIES OF THE STATE Kamila Shamsie has re-worked Sophocles’Antigone, turning her acute eye on one of the major issues of our age. ‘The ones we love are enemies of the state’ - Antigone, Sophocles

Isma, a young British Muslim woman, is striking out independently. After years of raising her twin siblings in NorthLondon, she is heading to America. But she is followed there by the things that haunt her – a father who died en route to Guantanamo, a brother, Parvaiz, who has been lured to Raqqa to join Islamic State, and a sister, Aneeka, who she leaves behind grieving and unstable, unable to cope without her beloved twin brother.

Eamonn is the son of a prominent British Muslim politician, one whose roots mingle with the community in which Isma and her siblings grew up. When he and Isma meet in America they strike up an acquaintance – which ends abruptly when Eamonn’s father becomes the new British Home Secretary, with a particularly fierce and unforgiving stance on Jihadis, and Isma feels she must tell Eamonn about her own father.

Parvaiz, struggling with the absence of his father throughout his childhood, and falling under the influence of a practiced local recruiter, has been lured to Raqqa. But life in Islamic State is not what he expected, and in cautious and covert communications with Aneeka they start exploring how he might escape back to London.

When Eamonn appears on Aneeka’s doorstep with a package from Isma, he falls in love at first sight. For her, Eamonn is something altogether more complicated. He represents possibility. If her brother is ever to return safely to London she will need powerful figures on side.


Isma, Parvaiz, Aneeka and Eamonn must all work out where they fit into the world, what matters to them – and to what they will, ultimately, be loyal.The stage is set for a tragedy.

This is a novel about family, about sacrifice, and about the state of the world. Timely, moving and, as always from Kamila Shamsie, beautifully written.

Kamila Shamsie has a number of formidable achievements behind her: she is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and named a Granta Best of Young British Novelist (2013). She is the author of six novels, one of which - Burnt Shadows - was translated into 22 languages and shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. Her most recent novel, A God in Every Stone, was shortlisted for the Baileys Women Prize for Fiction. Salman Rushdie has said of her that she is ‘a writer of immense ambition and strength.She understands a great deal about the ways in which the world’s many tragedies and histories shape one another’.