Kamila Shamsie: ‘Where is the American writer writing about America in Pakistan? There is a deep lack of reckoning’

The Pakistani writer on patriarchy, cricket and the unashamedly political nature of her novels: The Guardian

“I want to go to Peshawar,” a young Englishwoman with a passion for archeology tells her mother in Kamila Shamsie’s latest novel, A God in Every Stone (Bloomsbury), “because there’s more past than present there.” While Vivian Rose Spencer goes on to dig her way into the past literally – in a dramatic hunt for an ancient artefact as Britain’s imperial reign crumbles – Shamsie does so with words. “I love the part of history that is story,” she tells me from her flat perched high among trees near Lord’s cricket ground in north London. “If a thing is interesting enough, then I want to find the story in it.”