Kamila Shamsie

During the pandemic lockdowns in the world’s most locked-down city, I made a survey of the reading habits of friends and acquaintances. While nineteenth-century classics were popular – Austen and Dickens were favourites, Tolstoy too, and Middlemarch – realist fiction, in general, dominated the reading choices. Among Australian writers were Christina Stead, Jessica Anderson, and Heather Rose. Other contemporary writers included Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Patrick Gale. One friend read umpteen novels from the Indian subcontinent; it was, she said, her best travel option given the circumstances. Another friend decided to read all of Bellow; he wanted, he said, to discover what everyone had been raving about. At a time when our own life stories were severely curtailed, there was a surge towards the big stories of others.

Sophocles might not have foreseen when he wrote his tragedy Antigone in 441 BCE that the issues he explored would remain topical in 2017. In the play, Polynices, Antigone’s brother, has died whilst attacking Thebes, his own city, in a bid for the crown. Creon, king of Thebes, has ordered that Polynices’s body be left unburied ...

In 515 bce, Scylax, explorer and storyteller, sets sail from Caspatyrus in King Darius’s empire. Eclipsing time, this antique glimpse shifts to an archaeological dig in Turkey in 1914, one that is abandoned when war breaks out.In the service of ‘king and country’, lives change immeasurably. Vivian Rose Spencer exchanges archaeology for nursing wounded soldiers in London hospitals. Qayyum Gul is a non-commissioned officer in a British Army regiment, the 40th Pathans. He loses an eye at Ypres and is invalided home to Peshawar, Caspatyrus’s modern incarnation.