Kamila Shamsie, is an award-winning, Pakistani British author who has written eight critically acclaimed novels, including Kartography, In the City by the Sea, Burnt Shadows, A God in Every Stone, and Home Fire, which won the Women’s Prize for Fiction and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Her novels have been translated into over thirty languages. Peter Morey’s book provides a timely and well-researched study of Shamsie’s works as a means of tracing Shamsie’s growth from a local to transnational author against the rapidly changing sociopolitical milieu of Pakistan and Britian.

Morey’s book makes an important contribution to existing Marxist, feminist, and psychoanalytic scholarship on Kamila Shamsie by offering a postcolonial mapping of the ways in which the residues of colonial power determine the relationship between identity, state, and territory. Morey’s work is also the first book-length study of Kamila Shamsie’s novels, offering an encompassing and incisive overview of the development of ideas of home, religion, belonging, mobility, dispossession, and trauma across the chosen works.

A major strength of this book is its attention to sociopolitical contextualization as a means of familiarizing readers with the geopolitical dimensions of Shamsie’s works. This contextualization also highlights the ways that Shamsie maps macropolitical developments onto major urbanscapes as a means of “creating a multimedia cartographical record that will form an archive allowing the city’s diversity to express itself through the shared memories and identifications of its varied populace” (p. 27).

Another contribution of the book is the mapping of the evolution of formal innovation techniques across Shamsie’s texts, examining the politics of storytelling and the remembered biases through which people construct the narratives of their lives. The book traces the ways in which Shamsie’s work has evolved from social realism to mythical realism while highlighting the powerful drivers of colonialism. Specifically, Morey’s explication of the form of Shamsie’s later novels—such as Kartography, Burnt Shadows, A God in Every Stone, and Home Fire—draws attention to the ways that legacies of colonialism determine questions of citizenship, securitization, profiling, and belonging in the postcolonial present.

The book also expands our reading practices for Shamsie’s novels through a nuanced explication of the intertextual invocations within the chosen texts. Through her reworking of Western texts, Shamsie deepens the thematic capaciousness of her works by generating a textured discussion of the impact of historical legacies, mythological palimpsests, and marginalized narratives on identity formation. Morey highlights Shamsie’s skill in worlding the novel to “reinstate its connective power and the human (as opposed to economic) sense of globalized subjectivity—against those purist forces of nationalism and empire that are trying to narrow and capture (or eject) subjects who transgress established categories” (p. 59)

Morey’s book provides a comprehensive and accessible overview of Shamsie’s works that will appeal to a broad audience, including readers, scholars, and educators. The incisive commentary on the transhistorical and intertextual dimensions of Shamsie’s novels underscores their international lineage. By doing so, Morey broadens the interpretive framework for contemporary Pakistani political fiction that uses counter-realism, decentered perspectives, and referential satire to critique the urban-rural class divide and advocate ethical action, as seen in works by Mohammad Hanif and Daniyal Mueenuddin.

Morey’s book urges readers to recognize and appreciate the cosmopolitanism within Shamsie’s works. This includes a focus on the works’ multiple focalizations that reveal the globalized economic, political, and miliary forces affecting the fates of different generations of Muslims. Morey’s book offers an inspiring and compelling read that reaffirms the importance of Shamsie’s works as global literature that should be lauded for its thoughtful engagement with issues of power, ethics, and justice across borders and boundaries. Overall, the book is a significant and timely contribution to the field of literary scholarship, postcolonial writing, and cultural studies.