Author(s): Kamila Shamsie

Novel | Read our reviews! | Pakistan | London

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.

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STELLA'S REVIEW:
It’s Karachi, 1988, and best friends Zahra and Maryam are negotiating their teenage years alongside dynamic political change. Each has a dream: one to inherit the family business, the other to study abroad. Private school girls — Zahra there for her academic prowess, Maryam on the basis of class and her family name — their lives are ones of privilege, but tentatively so. Being young women in this society brings with it expectations and restrictions for both. For Zahra with her school-teacher mother and her cricket commentator father, nothing can be taken for granted. To win a place at an overseas university, she must be better, academically and socially, than all the other students. Pressures from the military regime loom large in her psyche and on the eve of the downfall of General Zia, luck averts a moral crisis for her family. For Maryam, her grandfather’s favourite, taking on the family leatherworks business is never a given, but she’s confident of winning what she sees as her rightful position, female or not. When Maryam returns from summer with her family in London, Zahra notices a shift in her bearing. Maryam is changing and Zahra is confronted by this new bolder young woman aware of her physical presence in the world. Change is in the air. The election of Benazir Bhutto is a pivotal moment for the friends and they feel like they are invincible as they celebrate. Under this breakthrough, though, lie all the issues of gender and class inequality, which won’t be easily undone. On the micro-scale, Maryam is attracting the attention of an older teen boy, Hammad — all leather jacket and slicked back hair — and this creates a fissure in the girls’ friendship, one which will have repercussions in their adult lives, decades on. When a ride in a car goes drastically wrong, both Zahra and Maryam’s lives are turned upside down. Maryam is sent away to boarding school in the UK and Zahra carries with her a sense of guilt and shame she can’t throw off. The second half of the novel is set in 2019. Zahra is a successful civil liberties advocate, and Maryam the CEO of an entrepreneurial investment company. While their friendship has endured, the differences between them are stark. Yet they are also bound by their shared history, personal and cultural. Here Shamsie uses the tensions in their relationship to tease out political and cultural issues, such as facial recognition technology and state control, migration and deportation. Here also, the novel starts to unpick Zahra’s complex sexual repression and Maryam’s alienation from her partner. It examines the role power has in personal, as well as political, relationships. There’s an impending sense of doom, as each of the friends’ behaviours and choices set off a ricochet of events which require them to face each other and themselves. Another powerful novel from the award-winning author of Home Fire. 

This powerful new novel from the author of Home Fire contrasts the fates of two school friends whose lives are set on different tracks by an incident in their teenage years. Bridging Karachi and London, the novel unpicks the operations of power through class and gender, both in Pakistan and abroad, and explores the tensions and bonds of friendship and culture. Another subtle and insightful novel from this fine writer. 
>>Stella reviews the book on RNZ. 
>>Thorny issues. 
>>Friendship, power, and ethics. 
>>Does principle or loyalty make for the better friend? 
>>Why friendship? 
>>What kind of democracy is this?