LONDON: While books have recently and surprisingly become the talk of the town in Pakistan, Karachi-born author Kamila Shamsie won the International Women's prize for fiction for her 2017 book 'Home Fire'.

Marked as Shamsie's seventh work of prose, Home Fire follows British Muslim "Isma" and her family members, all of whom are dispersed around the world. The "suspenseful and heartbreaking" story, according to Penguin Random House publishers, is "of an immigrant family driven to pit love against loyalty, with devastating consequences". It deals with the linkages between a Pakistani family, their bonds tightening and loosening, their fears and long-lost hopes, as well as terrorism.— INP