A God in Every Stone

By Kamila Shamsie

BY THE WINNER OF THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION
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'I can't recommend A God in Every Stone by Kamila Shamsie too strongly ... Exciting and, in the end, profoundly moving, this will solace you during the grimmest holiday' - Antonia Fraser, Guardian Summer Reading

'A magnificent novel: beautiful, terrible, true … It reads already like a classic' - Ali Smith

'A moving story of love and betrayal, generosity and brutality, hope and injustice, full of characters that stay with you' - Financial Times
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Shortlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction

Summer, 1914. Young Englishwoman Vivian Rose Spencer is in an ancient land, about to discover the Temple of Zeus, the call of adventure, and love. Thousands of miles away a twenty-year-old Pathan, Qayyum Gul, is learning about brotherhood and loyalty in the British Indian army. Summer, 1915. Viv has been separated from the man she loves; Qayyum has lost an eye at Ypres. They meet on a train to Peshawar, unaware that a connection is about to be forged between their lives – one that will reveal itself fifteen years later when anti-colonial resistance, an ancient artefact and a mysterious woman will bring them together again.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Apr 10, 2014
• ISBN: 9781408847220

Kamila Shamsie

Kamila Shamsie is the author of six novels including Home Fire which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2017, shortlisted for the Costa Best Novel Award, the Books Are My Bag Readers Awards 2018, and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, and won the London Hellenic Prize and the Women's Prize for Fiction 2018. Three of her novels have received awards from Pakistan's Academy of Letters. Kamila Shamsie is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and was named a Granta Best of Young British Novelists in 2013; she was also awarded a South Bank Arts Award in 2018. She grew up in Karachi and now lives in London.

Reviews for A God in Every Stone

[bodachliath · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is one of the best books I have read this year. A cleverly constructed multi-threaded historical novel, largely set in the city of Peshawar - the central personal stories are gripping, and the novel explores deeper themes of empires and their legacies, the nature of archaelogy and the experiences of Asians who served the British in Europe during the First World War. Moving, lyrical and highly impressive.

[gayla.bassham · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Huh. I sat down to write this review and realized that I have very little to say about A God in Every Stone. Nothing stood out to me. The plot was okay, the characters were fine, the writing was solid. It is the beige of this year's Women's Bailey's Prize longlist.

[donna828 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Vivian Spenser is an intelligent and curious young English woman who falls in love with an archaeologist in Turkey, but must return to London at the onset of WWI. She unknowingly betrays him but carries on his quest for the missing silver circlet of Scylax in Peshawar. . She becomes involved with two Pashtun brothers over the course of her two visits to present-day Pakistan. The youngest, Najeeb, is her student who later becomes employed the by local museum and requests her help with resuming the dig to recover the legendary circlet. She returns in 1930 only to get caught up in the chaos of the massacre which changed the course of India's dream for independence from British rule.This was a very complex story which may have tried to do too much. I would have liked to know more about Qayyum, Najeeb's brother who fought for the Brits in Yrpes and lost an eye and his allegiance to England in battle. The author covers a vast amount of legend and history in her book which requires careful reading. I continue to be fascinated by the history of the British colonization of India, and now I have another piece of that puzzle. Still, I am left wanting to know more. This book was shortlisted for the Bailey's Women's Prize for Fiction.

[smits_52 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This novel never captured me. I was never quite sure of the setting or the circumstances. I never knew the characters well enough to care about them. The best part for me was the last few chapters.

[rainpebble_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A God in Every Stone by Kamila Shamsie; (5*)Stretching from the ancient Persian Empire to the waning days of the British Empire, this novel has an enormous span that immediately captured this readerIt begins on the eve of World War I, with Vivian Rose, a young British archaeologist on a dig in Turkey with an old family friend, a Turkish man, Bey. He is searching for an artifact from the earliest days of the Persian Empire, a silver circlet once belonging to an early Persian king, which Alexander the Great himself supposedly carried to India. Vivian falls in love with both man and profession and becomes smitten with every part of this foreign world.As the war overtakes such civilized practices as archaeology, Vivian returns to England never to see Bey again. Years later she travels east again, this time to the Peshawar Valley as an independent new woman but inside she is still on a quest for the circlet that had so obsessed the man she had loved. Her vision is still deeply bound to the landscape and the light of India.On her long train ride through this fabled territory she encounters Qayyum Gul, a young Muslim man from Peshawar. He is a soldier of the English Crown, who lost an eye in combat at Ypres. She was the nurse who gave him a cloth in which to keep his glass eye but they do not remember one another from those days.Both Qayyum and his mountainous home become part of Vivian's life as does his younger brother Najeeb.Najeeb becomes an archaeologist and one of the directors of a small museum in Peshawar. In the spirit of E.M. Forster and his own attempt at fusing east and west in A Passage to India, Shamsie portrays Najeeb as the successor to the Englishwoman's vision of the region. The past has its glories and its beautiful images.Meanwhile, in the novel's present-day Peshawar, tension between the occupying English and the militant Indians, Hindu and Muslim, grows more menacing by the day. But even as disaster looms, so does our fascination with these characters. — the possibility that British forces may massacre peacefully demonstrating civilians — seems imminent, our empathy for the Gul brothers and their civilized British friend grows. As does the novel's breadth.From the far distant past of the Persian Empire to the British massacre in Peshawar, we can see the outline of that ancient circlet boldly portrayed, representing a bond between times and peoples that brings to mind Forster's famous edict about linking people, places, histories: "Only connect." In this way, Najeeb looks at the circlet and sees "a greeting across centuries."I highly recommend this novel to anyone who, as I do, has a fascination with the time of the Raj or Indian history. I love the storyline, the way it was written (though if it had one falldown that would be it), the characters and most everything about it. I will be reading more of her work.

[elkiedee · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

In a year when there are many historical novels about World War I and its repercussions, Kamila Shamsie’s latest book stands out for several reasons. One is the high quality of Shamsie’s writing. Another is that the focus is very different – not just the fighting in Western Europe or the home front, but the impact of the war, and its aftermath, way beyond Europe, specifically in the area of British-ruled India around Peshawar (some years before Partition and the creation of Pakistan as a separate country). Shamsie is from Pakistan but has lived in Britain for the last few years, and so this isn’t just a historical novel written by a Westerner and set somewhere exotic – I do enjoy some of those but it’s interesting to read something with more substance.On a trip to an ancient archaeological site in Turkey in summer 1914, Vivian begins to look at a family friend in a new light. Her friendship with Tahsin Bey seems to be developing into an unspoken romantic understanding. Then the travellers receive news of the war in Europe, and Vivian has a telegram from her father – she must find a way to travel home immediately, with just a whispered promise from Tahsin Bey: “When the war ends, Vivian Rose”. Back in London she works as a VAD (volunteer nurse) for a few months, before setting off to Peshawar to see an ancient archaeological treasure, and hoping to meet Tahsin Bey.There is plenty to explore there, but there is also simmering conflict between Indian nationalist aspirations and the repressive society of the British in India – the British take a dim view of a young woman wanting to lead archaeological expeditions with the local Pathan people. She returns to London but not before forming a lasting friendship.Qaayum Gul is one of many Indian men who fought in Europe, and this novel is as much his story as Viv’s. They meet on the train to Peshawar in 1915, and then again in 1930 when Vivian returns.World War I was a war which affected the whole world, in an era when so much of Asia and Africa was divided up between European powers and precarious empires. There is so much new to me historical background here that it gave me a whole list of things – places, events etc – I needed to look up. Shamsie doesn't lay everything out as chunks of fact that can really interfere with some historical novels, but her book is clearly informed by historical research and perspectives.A fascinating and thought provoking story – this is the first Kamila Shamsie book I’ve read but I really must get to all her previous books very very soon.