About the Book
In eight unflinching and stunningly crafted stories, Kanza Javed unspools the lives of characters desperately trying to forge a path for themselves on the margins of society. An addict teaches his young son to shoot feral dogs on the streets of Lahore. A Christian nurse gets drawn into a plan to trap the ghost of her patient’s former lover. A Pakistani student in a small Appalachian town grapples with a startling act of violence that shatters her illusions of safety and freedom. A lonely wife becomes increasingly obsessed with a cloth worry doll left behind by a previous tenant.
Written with sharp insight and remarkable empathy, these stories reach across divides of class, gender, and religion as Javed deftly examines questions of identity and agency, belonging and loss. What Remains After a Fire is a moving portrayal of fiercely resilient characters who desire more than what their circumstances can offer them—and what these desires ultimately cost them.
Format: Hardcover (240 pages) Publisher: W. W. Norton
Publication date: 28th October 2025 Genre: Contemporary Fiction, Short Stories
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My Review
Longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize 2026, the description of What Remains After A Fire as ‘a haunting, powerful collection of stories’ is absolutely spot on. It’s a fantastically strong collection, each story containing something to admire, to move you or to make you think about things in a different way.
Recurring themes of the stories include motherhood, grief and loss, the weight of cultural expectation and family obligations, and the often unbearable burden of secrets. Many of the female characters (and they are predominately female) are struggling to keep things together or to move forward with their lives. Death and dying feature frequently, often associated with facing up to guilt about past actions, even the idea that current suffering is the price to be paid for wrongdoings. Past trauma is replayed in nightmares or the ghosts of departed loved ones. Misfortune is seen as evidence of evil spirits, a much more convenient explanation than the result of human actions.
The male characters are often predatory, or cowed by social pressure or purveyors of a toxic masculinity. For example, in ‘Stray Things Do Not Carry A Soul’, a boy begins to absorb his father’s negative attitude to the women of the household, the boy’s mother and sister. ‘Do you see how the witches are conspiring against us?’ When the boy suggests his sister should be married off, his father responds approvingly ‘Now you’re thinking like a man’.
Each story is beautifully crafted and I found myself frequently jotting down phrases that stood out for me. For example, in ‘Rani’, a young woman’s dying grandmother is described as existing ‘in fragments, in vapors’. And in ‘I Will Follow You Home’, the city of Lahore is ‘a mottled mess of vanishing history and new regimes.’ In ‘Carry It All’ a woman who has suffered multiple miscarriages imagines ‘a heavenly orphanage for ghostly, unborn children’. She’s made to feel a failure by her husband’s family for being unable to bear a son, her childhood dreams of marriage and motherhood recognised now as mere fantasy. ‘In the real world – bodies matter, and in some houses, fertility was the only currency.’ And in ‘My Bones Hold A Stillness’, a young student reflects, ‘Guilt wrecks people. It chews them right up.’
In What Remains After A Fire the author explores what is left behind after loss, betrayal and displacement. Sometimes it’s nothing, sometimes mere fragments of a previous life, sometimes it’s a seed of something that just might grow and flourish if nurtured.
My thanks to Henrietta at Midas for inviting me to join the blog tour celebrating the longlist and to W.W. Norton for my review copy.
In three words: Poignant, intimate, disquieting
About the Author
Kanza Javed is a Pakistani author with an MFA in Fiction from West Virginia University, where she received the Rebecca Mason Perry Award. She is also the winner of the 2020 Reynolds Price Prize for Fiction. Her writing has been published in the American Literary Review, Punch Magazine, Salamander and Greensboro Review, among other publications.
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