The award-winning author of Home Fire delivers a characteristically insightful and compelling examination of identity, friendship and the contradictions of contemporary London as two Pakistani women confront the disturbing ghosts of their past.
A dazzling new novel of friendship, identity and the unknowability of other people - from the international bestselling author of Home Fire, winner of the Women's Prize for Fiction.
Fourteen-year-old Maryam and Zahra have always been the best of friends, despite their different backgrounds. Maryam takes for granted that she will stay in Karachi and inherit the family business; while Zahra keeps her desires secret, and dreams of escaping abroad.
This year, 1988, anything seems possible for the girls; and for Pakistan, emerging from the darkness of dictatorship into a bright future under another young woman, Benazir Bhutto. But a snap decision at a party celebrating the return of democracy brings the girls' childhoods abruptly to an end. Its consequences will shape their futures in ways they cannot imagine.
Three decades later, in London, Zahra and Maryam are still best friends despite living very different lives. But when unwelcome ghosts from their shared past re-enter their world, both women find themselves driven to act in ways that will stretch and twist their bond beyond all recognition.
Best of Friends is a novel about Britain today, about power and how we use it, and about what we owe to those who've loved us the longest.
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
ISBN: 9781526647702
Number of pages: 336
Dimensions: 216 x 135 mm
A defining novel for our times … An intimate study of the ties that bind us - Stylist
A shining tour de force about a long friendship’s respects, disrespects, loyalties and moralities. Shamsie never compromises. This novel is of a rare quality, and even more evidence of her ability to write fiction that’s simultaneously vividly alive to its time and so good and true that it’s as if it has always been with us. - ALI SMITH, GUARDIAN, Summer Books 2022
I loved Best of Friends by Kamila Shamsie– witty and painful, and so sharp on the problem of love and politics - Katherine Rundell, Guardian
An adolescent coming-of-age novel and paean to female friendship … particularly excellent on the particularities of adult friendship forged in childhood - Independent
A moving exploration of friendship and identity across ideological divides - GRAZIA
A new Kamila Shamsie novel is always worth celebrating, but Best of Friends is something else: an epic story that explores the ties of childhood friendship, the possibility of escape, the way the political world intrudes into the personal, all through the lens of two sharply drawn protagonists - OBSERVER, BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2022
The spirit of Elena Ferrante haunts this tale of a friendship forged in Karachi - SUNDAY TIMES
A profound novel about friendship. I loved it to pieces - MADELINE MILLER
It is a rare writer who can examine with such insight and tenderness the forces that bind us to certain moments in life, and do it in language that is both precise and exquisite, expansive and attuned to the tiniest emotional detail. Kamila Shamsie has done it again in this magnificent, profoundly moving novel. Best of Friends is compulsive reading, and a reminder that in the end, the strongest force is always love - MAAZA MENGISTE
A powerful story about friendship - RED
A compelling exploration of private and public lives in free fall in 1980s Karachi - IRISH TIMES, Books of the year
The human heart can harbour deeply hidden contradictions. Here Kamila Shamsie brilliantly unearths the darker emotions that can live beneath the surface of a friendship - virtue laced with venality and love poisoned with the sugared toxins of envy and even hate. A disturbing and carefully crafted novel of rich psychological insight - BARONESS HELENA KENNEDY QC
Friendship and power collide in Best of Friends - GUARDIAN, BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2022
A gripping portrayal of female connection - FINANCIAL TIMES, Books of the year
A twisting story brilliantly told - EVENING STANDARD, Autumn highlights
A haunting novel which asks big questions about justice, class, and the borders of our moral selves, all wrapped around the deliciously absorbing story of a childhood friendship that endures - fun, complicated, the kind of friendship that feels elemental - MEGHA MAJUMDAR, author of A BURNING
Sophisticated and poignant … A moving portrait of two lifelong friends - KIRKUS REVIEWS
A beautiful, enchanting story about friendship - INDEPENDENT
A story of power, identity and friendship … Told in lyrical prose, Best of Friends is a compelling tale by one of today’s greatest writers - MONOCLE
I devoured this novel. Both a stinging indictment of corruption and prejudice in modern Britain and a nuanced portrait of friendship - The Bookseller
‘Best of Friends has much the same premise as Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet: a friendship charted from girlhood to middle age, taking in education, puberty, sex, ideological conflicts, personal rivalries, intimate secrets …’ - Guardian
Cleverly captures the competitive nature of even the closest friendships … a beautifully crafted novel with excellent characterisation, skilfully interweaving the personal and the political throughout - Daily Mirror
The relationship between Maryam and Zahra captures the passion, intimacy and depth of longstanding female friendships as well as the hidden currents that sometimes take decades to rise to the surface. The realities of life under dictatorship in 1980's Pakistan is highlighted against the privileges and concerns of the upper class. This is a magnificent and important novel by a writer in full mastery of her powers - Nadifa Mohamed, author of the Booker shortlisted The Fortune Men
Wonderfully realised. Shamsie captures the fizz and fissure of teenage friendship, the rivalry and trust, the secrets shared and hidden. … Shamsie’s observations about social media are clever and incisive, as are those about Pakistani and English social mores - Art Review
PRAISE FOR HOME FIRE: The book for our times - Judges of the Women's Prize 2017
Home Fire has lit a light that'll never go out - Ali Smith
Her prose is propulsive and unfailingly elegant, and her eye for detail is acute ... A brave and brilliant novel - Sunday Times
Managed to do all the things I want novels to do - tell me something about the world, give me a tiny glimpse into the otherness of others, and, most of all, give me that ache of longing as I turned the last page and realised I would never meet these characters again - Tahmima Anam, Observer
Shamsie's writing resonates on the human, political and lyrical plane but its topicality, tight plot and vivid characterisation also suggest a film script in the making - New Statesman, Books of the Year
Elegant and evocative ... A powerful exploration of the clash between society, family and faith in the modern world, tipping its hat to the same dilemma in the ancient one - Guardian
Builds to one of the most memorable final scenes I've read in a novel this century ... There is high, high music in the air at the end of Home Fire - New York Times
Utterly contemporary and deeply original too - Arifa Akbar, Evening Standard
One of the best novels of the year ... magnificent ... Insistently intelligent without becoming didactic ... conveyed in prose of stunning suppleness and economy ... Home Fire is everything literary fiction should be - an exciting, beautiful, profound novel of lasting value that deserves laurels - Spectator
Maryam and Zahra have been best friends for so long, they can't remember how it started. BOF follows the friendship of these two women in two parts: first in the 1980s when they are 14, living in a politically... More
The ending of this novel is, I think, brilliant. I also think that it will act as a sort of Rorschach test for readers, and can imagine many different takes on it.
Shamsie simply gives us a time (a significant time)...
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*I received a free preview copy of this book from NetGalley*
‘Best-friendship wasn’t an vast expanse of time any more; it was being there when it mattered.’
This novel is divided into two halves - the first is set...
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