Burnt Shadows is, like The Wasted Vigil, constructed as a blend of omniscient narration and polyphony. … Indeed, the novel has a particular interest in time, something indicated in the opening pages, where a fragment of prologue offers us a proleptic snapshot of the novel's end, with a shackled Raza awaiting his inevitable transfer to Guantánamo Bay. This foreshadowing continues with the first words of the novel proper: "Later, the one who survives will remember that day as grey." These words immediately throw us into the future beyond an as yet unnamed tragedy. … This link is not stated for us. Rather, the temporal resonance—like others, such as that between Japanese wartime mistrust of Europeans and post-9/11 Islamophobia—is left for the reader to pick up on.

Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, loc. 419