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A Study of Friendship Where the Past Really Is Another Country

Kamila Shamsie’s new novel, “Best of Friends,” follows its title characters from their Pakistani girlhoods to their adult lives in London.

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BEST OF FRIENDS, by Kamila Shamsie

The true horror of puberty isn’t the emergence of surprising hairs and baneful odors but the abrupt arrival of consequences. Physical ones, obviously — like the sudden possibility of getting pregnant or impregnating someone — but also existential consequences. To enter puberty is to discover not only that the stakes have ratcheted up, but that such a thing as “stakes” exist.

Kamila Shamsie’s novel “Best of Friends” begins at this volatile time — and in a volatile location, too: Karachi, 1988. The best friends are Maryam Khan and Zahra Ali. Maryam is intuitive and romantic; Zahra cerebral and skeptical. Both are 14 years old. Both are privileged but only Maryam is superrich, with private security guarding the family manse and a promise that she will inherit her grandfather’s luxury leather goods business.

Roads are about to fork. Puberty comes to Maryam first. Initially she thinks she has “lost the ability to judge her own dimensions” — like a person hopping into a rental car and immediately severing a side mirror — until she observes that when she accidentally bumps breast-first into strangers, the strangers are always, and suspiciously, men. Zahra experiences her own similar metamorphosis soon after.

Their new visibility is briefly enjoyable. Being a pretty young girl delivers all the rewards of fame without any of the striving normally required to achieve it: People are nice to Maryam and Zahra, boys are awed by them, strangers are glad to perform random favors. But the downside is significant. An ambient thrum of potential sexual violence culminates in an episode where the two are abducted — though not physically assaulted — by a classmate’s driver.

At the novel’s midpoint we jump forward three decades to London in 2019. Here it becomes clear that “Best of Friends” is not quite a novel but more like two novellas, the first energetic and the second bland. Going from the Karachi half to the London half is like exiting an idiosyncratic local restaurant and entering a Starbucks. There’s an anonymous sleekness — almost a C.G.I.-enhanced quality — to the second section.

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A complicated bond: The Best of Friends, by Kamila Shamsie, reviewed

Maryam and zahra, once childhood companions in karachi, meet regularly in london decades later, though their values are often diametrically opposed.

• From magazine issue: 24 September 2022

Chloë Ashby

The Best of Friends

Kamila Shamsie

Bloomsbury Circus, pp. 336, £18

When I think of Kamila Shamsie’s Home F ire , I picture a pot boiling on a hob, the water level rising until it spills over the lip and onto the stove. In Best of Friends , the author’s seventh novel, the tension is still there, but the bubbles are contained. It’s more of a simmer, gentle but insistent – not unlike the ‘shared subtexts’ that pass between the protagonists.

We first meet Maryam and Zahra as 14-year-olds. It’s the summer of 1988 in Karachi and the two girls are preoccupied with standard teenage stuff (budding bodies, boys) and the kind of concerns that sadly become standard when living under a ‘repellent dictator’ (censored television, bomb and riot alarms, everyday violence). Maryam is wealthy, with a ‘casual attitude to academics’. Zahra is hard-working and needs to gain a scholarship if she’s to fulfil her dream of attending a top-tier university in Britain or America. The future looks bright when General Zia, who seized power in a military coup, dies, and a young woman, Benazir Bhutto, becomes prime minister. ‘It feels like more things are possible in the world than I’d believed,’ says Zahra. Excited by the prospect of something new, she makes a snap decision at a party celebrating a democratic Pakistan that puts the two friends in a compromising position and sees Maryam shipped off to boarding school.

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Shamsie, who was raised in Karachi and lives in London, sticks with the 14-year-olds in Pakistan until this fateful night, which takes place almost halfway through the book. The narrative then skips forward to 2019. The pair are living in London – Maryam in Primrose Hill, Zahra in ‘one of the unlovelier stretches’ north-west. And yet Zahra has made herself ‘exactly what she’d wanted to be – someone’. Two back-to-back profiles reintroduce the characters: a pithy interview with Zahra, now head of the Centre for Civil Liberties, runs in the Guardian ; another straighter interview with Maryam, a top venture capitalist, appears in Tech Capital News . In their forties, the women still have their differences, but they remain best friends and get together every Sunday.

If you’re worried that a novel about the longevity of childhood friendship sounds sentimental, don’t be. Tangled up with Maryam and Zahra’s relationship are questions of responsibility, justice, power and ethics. When Maryam joins an elite donor club that’s shamelessly pumping money into the UK government and which stands for everything Zahra has ‘spent her professional life fighting’, their faith in one another is tested. Life in London may seem simple compared with Karachi, but politics is politics. As Zahra tells the Guardian :

The British are too complacent that their democracy is so robust it can’t be weakened – things that would set off alarm bells in countries with histories of authoritarian rule are allowed to slide by with little noise here.

It’s the deep-rooted and complicated bond between the two women that keeps us turning the pages. Shamsie explores the changing nature of friendship, the way it consumes you when you’re young and later becomes about ‘being there’ when it matters. Also, the way it clouds your judgment. Zara reflects:

The problem with childhood friendship was that you could sometimes fail to see the adult in front of you because you had such a fixed idea of the teenager she once was, and other times you were unable to see the teenager still alive and kicking within the adult.

Alive and kicking beneath the surface. Simmering gently.

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Best of Friends

By Kamila Shamsie Riverhead: 320 pages, $27 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org , whose fees support independent bookstores.

“ Best of Friends ,” a new novel by Kamila Shamsie , opens on the first day of school, Karachi, Pakistan , 1988. Zahra, 14, watches her closest friend, Maryam, arrive in her family’s Mercedes after another summer abroad in London. Having spent months apart, they are startled by incontrovertible evidence that their adolescent bodies are changing, but their friendship of 10 years remains unaltered. “If you moved to Alaska tomorrow, we’d still be best friends for the rest of our lives,” Zahra tells Maryam — “the only person in the world toward whom Zahra displayed extravagant feelings.”

Shamsie’s 2017 novel, “ Home Fire ,” was praised for its retelling of Sophocles’ “ Antigone ” transferred to modern Britain and Pakistan. In “Best of Friends,” Shamsie once again contrasts the two countries, with a first half devoted to the girls’ lives in Pakistan and a second to their adult friendship in the U.K. In each country, Maryam and Zahra’s positions are intertwined with politics and money — not only raising the stakes of their relationship but also revealing troubling parallels between the former colony and its increasingly isolationist former colonizer.

The Pakistan-set half of Shamsie’s narrative is by far the more effective. In poetic prose, Shamsie details the small ways friends imprint themselves on each other: the secrets shared, the mutual pop-star crushes, the books passed between them, how a best friend can become a fixture in a family home. In Pakistan, the girls are hemmed in by a surveillance society in which confidences cannot be shared over tapped phones.

They are also divided by its enormous income disparities. Maryam, the presumed heir to her grandfather’s line of luxury leather accessories, bears outsize expectations but also enjoys the trappings of wealth, including a fortress house protected by the trappings of military power. These too, Shamsie highlights with a subtle touch: “Maryam’s father had carried a peach out of the house and he cut that in half, the scent of it perfuming the air. The guard walked back toward the driveway, wiping his hand against the butt of his Kalashnikov and smearing the cold water on his neck.”

Kamila Shamsie discusses updating Antigone with a British-Pakistani family in ‘Home Fire’

Novelist Kamila Shamsie picks up after just two distinctive British double ringtones, from her home in London.

Sept. 1, 2017

Zahra’s life is less extravagant, though her father’s new role as the anchor of a TV talk show about cricket has made him into a celebrity. As he is forced to toe the line for the military leadership, Zahra comes to feel trapped in Pakistan, “with its repellent dictator and its censored television and the everyday violence that had shrunk all their lives into private spaces.”

The first disruption in the friendship comes from a different kind of surveillance, the kind that looms over girls’ developing bodies. One night, they accept a ride in a car with a classmate and his friend. The girls are endangered, threatened with sexual assault, and even though they return unharmed, Maryam is whisked off to a British boarding school.

From the very start of the second half, the narrative feels forced. It opens with a jarring gimmick: back-to-back media profiles of the two friends, published in 2019, 30 years later and half a world away from their schoolgirl days in Karachi.

Zahra, profiled in the Guardian, is described as “a migrant Muslim woman who has become the voice of Britain’s conscience since she took on the position of Director at Britain’s oldest civil liberties organization a decade ago.” She helps refugees fight deportation, tacking against political winds as the country careens toward Brexit. (She is also exoticized, as Shamsie nails the establishment lefty paper’s tone, by being compared to a panther.)

Maryam, in a Q&A with Yahoo! Finance, is revealed to be a powerhouse in the world of technology and a kind of Tory girlboss; she wants to blow the gendered glass ceiling “to smithereens” while limiting migration via a merit-based system.

The friends may occupy near-opposite ends of the British political spectrum, but both embody the types of model immigrants the U.K. lauds itself for welcoming. Maryam moves comfortably among wealthy political donors and government officials. The Tories welcome her as proof of diversity even as the party denies sanctuary to those fleeing repression in Britain’s erstwhile colonies. (Maryam’s tokenism is a prescient touch from Shamsie, given the recent backlash to Prime Minister Liz Truss’ racially diverse, ideologically homogeneous new cabinet.)

Zahra and Maryam have managed to maintain a friendship built on a common past. “Perhaps that was the key to the longevity of childhood friendships,” Maryam thinks, “all those shared subtexts that no one else could discern. And perhaps shared subtexts felt even more necessary when you both lived far away from the city of your childhood that was itself the subtext to your lives. Childhood friendship really was the most mysterious of all relationships.”

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What finally tests that bond is the arrival in the U.K. of the two men who had been in the car — those whose threats had set the course of the women’s lives. The way it’s set in motion, alas, feels like a betrayal of Shamsie’s characters, a pure plot device requiring both women to act in ways that feel contrary to everything we know about them. Suffice it to say that as events progress, Zahra and Maryam are — there’s no other way to say it — corrupted.

Power corrupts, we already know, but what effect does it have on two women who have promised to trust each other no matter what? Where does the principle of loyalty stand in relation to every other principle in our lives? Where should it stand?

These are profound questions, but Shamsie’s answers feel too schematic, if only in contrast to the rich and deeply personal tone of the first part. There are, to be sure, powerful moments in which we can see how little a person changes — or rather how much a person’s youth has determined her course — even when removed to another part of the world, a system that seems (at least on the surface) to work differently.

It’s to Shamsie’s credit that, by the end, we know the systems aren’t any more different than the people running them. Yet it still feels that we have learned this at the expense of the characters. Maryam and Zahra are revealed merely to be two distinct archetypes of the “good immigrant” who are set on a crash course. At a time when soundbites and tweets have become our principal ways of communicating, Shamsie, a brilliant novelist and a subtle writer, felt a need to shout. Rather than letting us hear the echoes of a girlhood and another country in her grown characters, she loses faith in her readers to sense their vibrations.

Berry writes for a number of publications and tweets @BerryFLW .

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Kamila shamsie's novel 'best of friends' asks if all friendships are meant to last.

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NPR's Scott Simon talks with Kamila Shamsie about her novel, "Best of Friends," which follows the relationship between two women from their childhoods in Pakistan to adulthood in London.

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‘Best of Friends’ Review: An Underwhelming Tale of Childhood Friendship

Kamila Shamsie, author of several successful novels and writer for the Guardian presents a story on friendship, politics, and the boundaries of loyalty in her newest book, “Best of Friends.” The novel can be split into two narratives, each separated by 30 years and thousands of miles.

The first portion of the book is set in Karachi, Pakistan in the late 1980s.The novel follows two best friends in their early teens, Maryam and Zahra, as dictatorship makes tensions rise in their community. Maryam lives a life of comfort, privilege, and political influence, while Zahra is the daughter of a schoolteacher and a journalist who hosts a popular national cricket television program.

Shamsie does a nice job illustrating the way class can insert itself into even the closest of friendships — often in unsaid, almost indistinguishable ways, and sometimes in conversation-stopping, silencing ways. The cracks and canyons caused by class in close relationships are not lost on Shamsie, and this gives her characters an authenticity that is more than welcome.

After several chapters of introduction and buildup, the book takes off when Zahra convinces Maryam to ride home from a party with Jimmy and Hammad, two older boys. The men taunt and intimidate the girls, the threat of physical and sexual violence running just below the surface of their voices. While they could technically only be legally charged with reckless driving, the impact is crystal clear: This was an instance of gendered, and inherently sexual, violence and trauma.

The evening spurs a series of events that ends with Maryam sent to boarding school in England and Zahra left to finish secondary school without her. But more importantly, this event and the men that facilitated it are the axis, really, that the rest of the book revolves around.

Now, this could have been an effective tool, and it frequently is; the trauma bond is no new phenomenon to the contemporary reader. The problem here, though, is that the trauma and the way it bonds Zahra and Maryam gets muddled — dare I say, faded — over the course of the novel, which would have been fine if Shamsie hadn’t kept insisting on the reassertion of its importance. The two women that lead this novel are strong, complex personalities; they are assertive, successful, and not always totally agreeable, but — more often than not — fundamentally likable. Shamsie gives both of her characters the space and time to be full, multifaceted people.

So, while acknowledging this car ride from their teens as traumatic does the important work of identifying gender violence as something that can be nuanced (and never requiring physical harm to be legitimate), as the characters age, their relationship aging is more interesting than dredging up this scary memory. If Shamsie wanted to make this night the focal point of the novel, she either needed to make the personal/emotional impact of the event stronger or make the event itself more dynamic.

The second part of the book jumps ahead to 2019 in London and begins with a Guardian profile of Zahra and a Yahoo! Finance article on Maryam. The faux journalism is an awkward way to inform the reader of where the women’s adult lives have taken them, but they are not necessarily unpleasant. What is unpleasant, however, about the second portion of this novel is the startling lack of detail in some places and the excess attention given to others.

The entire novel struggles with visual details — very few scenes are described, few people are given physical characteristics, and movement between people, scenes, and places is not written in a way that permits the reader any rights to visualization. While the first part of the novel focuses on class in Karachi, once Zahra and Maryam move to London, this tension dissipates almost entirely, and the adjustment of moving from Pakistan to the United Kingdom goes totally unaddressed. Meanwhile, the reader spends a tedious amount of time considering the intricacies of Zahra’s human rights advocacy and the way that bristles against Maryam’s profit-over-all perspective.

Although reading about these parts of the characters’ lives can be interesting, the decision to include them feels awkward — not bad, just not what the reader was expecting (or wanting, for that matter). The prose works well, and everything that Shamsie addresses is important — but that’s part of the problem. In choosing to incorporate content and characters that all demand large amounts of attention, some don’t get what they deserve and others are overdone. And, all the while, the reader is not granted access to the images needed to process all these narrative pieces in a cohesive way. That’s not to say that every book owes its reader a rich, visual world, but this contemporary novel does and doesn’t step up to the challenge — or even acknowledge the challenge at all.

All in all, this book is not Shamsie’s best work, but it’s more than worth reading. The characters are dynamic and well-developed, and the plot is anything but boring. The friendship of Zahra and Maryam is a pleasure to witness, and Shamsie’s argument on the nature of violence towards women is astute and important. Unfortunately, the novel’s ultimate shortcoming is simply that some aspects are half-baked and underwhelming.

—Staff writer Kelsey S. Mann can be reached at [email protected].

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Kamila Shamsie’s Best of Friends is an affecting novel of friendship, power and ethics

Sessional Academic and Creative Writing PhD Candidate, University of Adelaide

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Lyn Dickens does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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Best of Friends , the latest novel from Women’s Prize-winner Kamila Shamsie, explores complexities of power and ethics within an enduring female friendship. Focused on two central characters, Zahra and Maryam, the novel considers questions of integrity, loyalty, and platonic love.

In an interview , Shamsie spoke of her desire “to take one of those friendships that has existed forever, and then put a lot of pressure on it”. She does this in Best of Friends through a nuanced examination of women wielding power and feeling powerless in a politically and socially unjust world.

Review: Best of Friends – Kamila Shamsie (Bloomsbury).

The novel is told from the points of view of Zahra and Maryam, who attend an elite school in Pakistan and grow up to have successful careers in the United Kingdom. It explores the interiority of both characters, focusing on key moments in their lives at ages 14 and 45.

From the novel’s blurb, one might expect stereotypical elements in the depictions of Zahra and Maryam’s femininity and friendship. Zahra is studious and well-informed, with progressive parents who work in education and the media. Maryam is wealthy, sexually attractive, popular, and sheltered by her privileged family.

Significantly, Zahra is trusted by parents and teachers alike, while Maryam is seen as a wayward teenager upon whom Zahra is a modifying influence. These preconceived ideas set the path for the girls’ eventual separation and the trajectories of their adulthood.

To Shamsie’s credit, the interior worlds of Zahra and Maryam are thoroughly explored. The reader becomes aware of the ways in which the two girls overstep the boundaries of feminine clichés. Zahra is responsible in her public life, but has a propensity for recklessness – what she describes as her “proclivities”. Maryam, despite the way her body is read and desired by men, marries a woman and develops an interest in technology that belies her status as a “popular” girl.

Read more: True writing is a convulsive act: inside the mind of Elena Ferrante

Shades of ambivalence

Novels concerning female friendship often involve shades of ambivalence. Elena Ferrante, the writer of one of the most popular novels of female friendship in recent years, My Brilliant Friend , has stated: “Relationships between women don’t have solid rules like those between men.”

Like My Brilliant Friend and another novel of female friendship, Swing Time by Zadie Smith, Best of Friends explores how access to privilege and power, or a lack thereof, tests the bonds between two women.

From this perspective, Best of Friends is a highly political novel. One of its strongest features is its ability to tell a relatable story of female friendship while developing a strong social critique of the sexist pressures experienced by women, both in Pakistan and the United Kingdom.

Shamsie links the discrimination experienced by women, described by Maryam as “girlfear”, with the inequalities of class, racism, and neoliberalism. Both characters are conscious of the stranglehold that is placed on their desires as women. The ways in which they seek to wield power in the face of their vulnerabilities leads to the novel’s key conflicts and ethical dilemmas.

Shamsie’s award-winning novel Home Fire (2017) was a beautiful, haunted work, shadowed by the myth of Antigone and eerily prescient about the rise of conservative political figures such as Sajid Javid and Priti Patel . Best of Friends lacks some of the more powerful imagery of Home Fire, but has a deeper engagement with its characters. Without writing for a white gaze, it is unselfconsciously concerned with the lives of women of colour.

In her depiction of Karachi, Shamsie creates a compelling sense of time and place, evoking the city’s tensions and beauty without pandering to exoticism. She also gives a nuanced portrayal of Primrose Hill and North London as an area inhabited by class-privileged people of colour, who are able to wield the power of discrimination, but still feel its sting.

Read more: Andrea Levy: her important body of work set out what it is to be black and British

Political realities and ethical choices

Like Home Fire, Best of Friends is concerned with the ways in which affective relationships collide with political realities and ethical choices. Zahra and Maryam find the lives of their teenaged selves overshadowed by the broader political climate of Pakistan and the repressive sexual politics that permeates Pakistani and British society.

Zahra’s fear that her politically independent father will be hurt by the dictator General Zia is juxtaposed with her burgeoning desire for sexual experimentation. Maryam’s imperviousness to the political situation is offset by the attention her newly formed body brings her, along with a sense of gender-based threat.

Here Shamsie’s novel can be read as capturing Iris Marion Young ’s concept of female bodily experience. Once Maryam experiences the physical changes of puberty and the threat of sexual assault, she realises that she is “a target now, her body a target”. She begins to understand

why men and women walked so differently, stood so differently. Men strode, owning the world. Women walked with smaller steps, watched and watchful. Her anger deepened into rage […] Not her. She would stride, always.

These intersections of gender-based discrimination and political violence define and dismantle Zahra and Maryam’s lives. They find that they are unable to understand the heart of each other’s character.

By the time the novel reaches its final conflict and betrayal, Zahra is the Director of the Centre for Civil Liberties, working against repressive British immigration policies, and Maryam is a venture capitalist involved in an ethically murky social media platform that is courting the UK’s Conservative government.

Zahra is increasingly repelled by what she sees as Maryam’s amoral nature. “Part of me has always hated you,” she tells her. Maryam struggles to understand what she perceives as Zahra’s disengagement from emotional connections. She begins to think of her friendship with Zahra as revealing the “unknowability” of another person.

Best of Friends is an affecting, tender, thought-provoking novel. It avoids easy answers to difficult ethical questions, peering instead into the hearts of its characters, revealing their flawed, self-serving, and loving natures. It tells a lively and compelling story, while keenly examining the mutability of power, the consequences of wielding it, and how easily the terrorised can slip into the role of the terroriser.

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The Subtext of Friendship in “Best Of Friends”

• Our review of Kamila Shamsie's latest novel, "Best of Friends."

The best thing about Kamila Shamsie’s eighth novel, Best of Friends , is the story isn’t hinged on a friendship gnarled with sexual, bodily, or intellectual envy. The conflict is more nuanced, primarily marred by a class difference, but more implicitly by the contradictions that exist within a life-long friendship. At times, the characters feel as though “the forty years of friendship between them were just a lesson in the unknowability of other people.” But in moments of strife, it is “too easy, for each of them to draw blood; they knew; they knew all the exposed places, the armor chinks and the softness of the belly beneath.” 

The first half of the novel is set in Karachi in 1988 during the final days of General Zia-ul-Haq’s dictatorship. The frightful climate of his reign, his sudden assassination, and the ascent of thirty-five-year-old Benazir Bhutto as the first female Prime Minister of Pakistan, contribute to creating a riveting backdrop to the adolescent lives of Maryam and Zara. Both are fourteen years old and in the same class at an elite school. Maryam is confident and belongs to an affluent family and hopes to inherit her cutthroat grandfather’s business, “Khan Leather.” At one point, wary of Maryam driving the family car without a license, her grandfather says: “It’s the only Mercedes of this model in all of Karachi.” Zahra, on the other hand, is diligent and comes from a family of little means.  Her father is a forthright and self-made television cricket-show anchor, caught in a conundrum between his principles and the dictatorship, while her mother is a school principal. They are the kind of people who Maryam’s mother describes as “decent and hardworking.” While Zahra’s household attaches “honorifics or familial relations” to the domestic staff, Maryam believes “class positions overrid[e] deference between generations.” 

The girls are aware of the class disparity and the afflictions of their respective social standings. But Shamsie uses this strife between class and desire as a catalyst in the development of her characters. It is, therefore, no surprise that Zahra grows up to be a highly scrupulous lawyer, while Maryam works for a profitable venture capital firm where she yields power by doling out punishments. 

This portion of the novel is excellent. Zahra and Maryam are juggling family drama, school, the changes in their adolescent bodies, aspirations, and male attention. They are old enough to understand that there exists a subset of fear—”girl-fear”—but young enough to jeopardize their lives in an act of rebellion. A late-night incident in a car involving a character named Jimmy escalates the stakes, upends their lives, and closes their time in Karachi. 

This is where the problem with the novel starts. The plot fast-forwards to 2019 when Zahra and Maryam are in their forties, living independent and ambitious lives in London. Every now and then, in the midst of an unrelated conversation, one of them mentions Jimmy. This seems forced, as if Shamsie is not confident in the connections she’s making in her story and that she must signal to the reader to remember what happened that night and to hold on to it until the chilling moments of confrontation that take place at the end. Shamsie could be granted leeway. Perhaps she wants to show that trauma works like a leaky faucet: it drips and deposits mold on the surface before it finally bursts. 

But Shamsie’s portrayal of the episode with Jimmy isn’t convincing enough to make it believable that Maryam and Zara are still clutching on to it after three decades. Even though the scene is thrilling, the fear palpable, the stakes heightened—it’s never to the point where we comprehend it to be the ultimate wound. 

The second half of the novel is also rushed. Shamsie doesn’t pause to leisurely explore connections or illustrate characters in deft strokes. Instead, she tries to tie in political issues to their motivations, leaving us with a distracting plot and a weak narrative arc. When the novel ends, you can’t help but wonder how Maryam and Zara sustained their friendship for as long as they did in spite of deep-seated resentment. Shamsie answers this in the very first pages: “Perhaps that was the key to the longevity of childhood friendships—all those shared subtexts that no one else could discover. And perhaps shared subtexts felt even more necessary when you both lived far away from the city of your childhood and that was itself the subtext to your lives.” Yet this subtext flounders at the first instance of conflict and the subtleties Shamsie effortlessly creates in the first half of Best of Friends dissolve like Zahra and Maryam’s friendship.

Call for Submissions: The Great Lakes Anthology

Best of Friends

by Kamila Shamsie

Riverhead Books

Published on September 27, 2022

Aliya Farrukh is a writer living in Brooklyn. Follow her on Twitter @aloo_matar.

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Best of Friends

Kamila shamsie. riverhead, $27 (320p) isbn 978-0-593-42182-6.

Reviewed on: 07/06/2022

Genre: Fiction

Hardcover - 336 pages - 978-1-5266-4770-2

Library Binding - 979-8-88578-130-5

Other - 1 pages - 978-0-593-42184-0

Paperback - 320 pages - 978-0-593-42183-3

Paperback - 336 pages - 978-1-5266-4771-9

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Best of Friends: A Novel Kindle Edition

• Print length 319 pages
• Language English
• Sticky notes On Kindle Scribe
• Publisher Riverhead Books
• Publication date September 27, 2022
• File size 2105 KB
• Page Flip Enabled
• Word Wise Enabled
• Enhanced typesetting Enabled
• See all details

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• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B09S8SGS3X
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Riverhead Books (September 27, 2022)
• Publication date ‏ : ‎ September 27, 2022
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• File size ‏ : ‎ 2105 KB
• Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
• Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
• Print length ‏ : ‎ 319 pages
• Page numbers source ISBN ‏ : ‎ 0593421825
• #1,406 in Friendship Fiction (Kindle Store)
• #1,913 in Friendship Fiction (Books)
• #2,416 in Family Life Fiction (Kindle Store)

About the author

Kamila shamsie.

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Word of Mouth

Submitting a book for review, write the editor, you are here:, best of friends.

• About the Book

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 if 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?

Best of Friends by Kamila Shamsie

• Publication Date: September 26, 2023
• Genres: Fiction
• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Riverhead Books
• ISBN-10: 0593421833
• ISBN-13: 9780593421833

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THE BEST OF FRIENDS

by Lucinda Berry ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 18, 2020

A mother’s worst nightmare on the page. For those who dare.

A shocking shooting involving their teenage sons leads three best friends to first come apart, then come together to figure out what happened that fateful night.

Lindsey, Kendra, and Dani, longtime friends who’ve grown up together and raised children together, now face their biggest struggle. A sleepover among their three teenage sons has claimed the life of Kendra’s son, Sawyer, and sent Lindsey’s son, Jacob, into a coma with a self-inflicted bullet. As alternating chapters represent each woman’s viewpoint (though their voices sound remarkably similar), the friends try to piece together what happened. Dani’s son, Caleb, is physically unscathed, but he barely talks or responds to anything except the nightmares haunting his every moment. Each woman is moved by forces such as her relationship with her husband and other children. Dani particularly suffers, as her husband, Bryan, resolves to lawyer up, making Dani look to Lindsey and Kendra as if she’s got something to hide. Dani makes no attempt to conceal the fact that Bryan’s gun did the shooting, but she’s unwilling to admit the extent to which Bryan controls her and her daughter, Luna. As Kendra faces the loss of her son, Lindsey drifts through a twilight zone in between worlds, taking care of Jacob the best she can and wondering what would ever drive her happy-go-lucky son to try to end his own life. The ongoing investigation by Detective Martin Locke, a high school acquaintance of the women, intensifies questions about who’s to blame.

Pub Date: Aug. 18, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-5420-2214-9

Page Count: -

Publisher: Thomas & Mercer

Review Posted Online: June 2, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2020

SUSPENSE | THRILLER | DETECTIVES & PRIVATE INVESTIGATORS | SUSPENSE | GENERAL & DOMESTIC THRILLER

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More by Lucinda Berry

BOOK REVIEW

by Lucinda Berry

THEN SHE WAS GONE

by Lisa Jewell ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 24, 2018

Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.

Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.

Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s ( I Found You , 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.

Pub Date: April 24, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Atria

Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018

GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | SUSPENSE | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | SUSPENSE

More by Lisa Jewell

by Lisa Jewell

by Michael Crichton & James Patterson ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 3, 2024

Red-hot storytelling.

Two master storytellers create one explosive thriller.

Mauna Loa is going to blow within days—“the biggest damn eruption in a century”—and John “Mac” MacGregor of the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory leads a team trying to fend off catastrophe. Can they vent the volcano? Divert the flow of blistering hot lava? The city of Hilo is but a few miles down the hill from the world’s largest active volcano and will likely be in the path of a 15-foot-high wall of molten menace racing toward them at 50 miles an hour. “You live here, you always worry about the big one,” Mac says, and this could be it. There’s much more, though. The U.S. Army swoops in, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff personally “drafts” Mac into the Army. Then Mac learns the frightening secret of the Army’s special interest in Mauna Loa, and suddenly the stakes fly far, far beyond Hilo. Perhaps they can save the world, but the odds don’t look good. Readers will sympathize with Mac, who teaches surfing to troubled teens and for whom “taking chances is part of his damned genetic code.” But no one takes chances like the aerial cowboy Jake Rogers and the photographer who hires him to fly over the smoldering, burbling, rock-spitting hellhole. Some of the action scenes will make readers’ eyes pop as the tension continues to build. As with any good thriller, there’s a body count, but not all thrillers have blackened corpses surfing lava flows. The story is the brainchild of the late Crichton, who did a great deal of research but died in 2008 before he could finish the novel. His widow handed the project to James Patterson, who weaves Crichton’s work into a seamless summer read.

Pub Date: June 3, 2024

ISBN: 9780316565073

Page Count: 432

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: June 20, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024

SUSPENSE | THRILLER | SUSPENSE

More by Daniel H. Wilson

by Michael Crichton & Daniel H. Wilson

by Michael Crichton

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