Sep 25

Sep 25 Best of Friends

Author: Kamila Shamsie
Publisher: Riverhead
Goodreads | The StoryGraph

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Note: Content and trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.

Cover Description

From the acclaimed author of Home Fire, the moving and surprising story of a lifelong friendship and the forces that bring it to the breaking point

Zahra and Maryam have been best friends since childhood in Karachi, even though--or maybe because--they are unlike in nearly every way. Yet they never speak of the differences in their backgrounds or their values, not even after the fateful night when a moment of adolescent impulse upends their plans for the future.

Three decades later, Zahra and Maryam have grown into powerful women who have each cut a distinctive path through London. But when two troubling figures from their past resurface, they must finally confront their bedrock differences--and find out whether their friendship can survive.

Thought-provoking, compassionate, and full of unexpected turns, Best of Friends offers a riveting take on an age-old question: Does principle or loyalty make for the better friend

TL;DR Review

Best of Friends is a quieter, lower-stakes novel than Home Fire, but it still crackles with scenic electricity. The character work here is also excellent. I liked it a lot.

For you if: You like books about friendship between women.

Full Review

Like pretty much everyone else, I was a big fan of Kamila Shamsie’s last novel, Homefire (which won the Women’s Prize in 2018). If you’re looking for a repeat experience, this isn’t it — Best of Friends is a quieter, lower-stakes novel — but it still crackles with in-scene electricity and explores similar ideas.

The story is told in two parts. In the first, Zahra and Maryam are unlikely life-long best friends living in Karachi, Pakastan. At 14, they’re each testing the limits of childhood and dipping a toe in rebellion in their own way. Then something happens that leaves them both affected and steers the direction of their lives. The second part picks up nearly 30 years later, with both women wildly successful in London. They’re still friends, but it’s a friendship that dances around the way their lives (and political views) have come to differ. And when a reminder of that long-ago incident comes to visit, those splinters become cracks.

There are a lot of signature Shamsie themes at play here — split loyalties, what it means to be a citizen, misogyny vs justice for women, xenophobia in the UK — but it’s mainly about the fight to keep a friendship strong despite being very different people from who you were as kids. Because they know you best, because they are all that’s left in your life of home, because their presence has always been a constant.

While it’s not a perfect book, I was still so impressed by Shamsie’s ability to create suspense in both everyday and climactic scenes. They make her books bingeable and give them life, even when the overall plot is lower stakes. She’s also given us two characters who are simultaneously sympathetic and not; flawed in different ways and the way they care for each other and their friendship. The tension and love between them (aka the whole point of the novel) was expertly done.

I’m eager to see what more readers come to think of this one!