3.5 stars rounded down

I was a bit undecided about how to rate this book. On the whole, I enjoyed reading it. The story is well-written and pulls you in quickly, making it easy to read (I finished this in a day). I really enjoyed the first part set in Zahra and Maryam's childhood, were we get to learn about their friendship which seems to persist against all odds. I was really interested to see how their story would turn out around 30 years later, which is what the second part of the book is about. However, the story about the adult Zahra and Maryam felt a bit rushed and left me unsatisfied. Overall, however, this still makes an interesting read, not least because it provides some insights into life in Pakistan in the 1980s.

I love how Kamila Shamsie writes about relationships, particularly between women. Home Fire about the bond between sisters, in this one the bond between best friends. Girls who have grown up together in Karachi, and have now become women who live in London. Very different personalities and lives, but both high profile and both with trauma from the past. This book addresses the way that you can know someone all your life, but still there are the things that can't be talked about, that they carry around unspoken but which have informed their relationship.

Zahra and Maryam are wonderful characters, both so bold and powerful in their own ways, both living a life that is fulfilling and rich, but also still carrying the baggage of an experience that happened to them when they were teenagers. Something that changed their perspective on the world. I loved the way that their different perspectives on this were written. This author can pinpoint particular moments and write about the emotions that her characters feel so well, but she also writes great supporting characters who are full of life and who feel incredibly real.

This really is wonderful. I enjoyed every scene, even though you'll feel uncomfortable at times, sad at others and slightly in love with these well drawn women at other times, this is a book the charm you and inform you about politics and culture.

Read it for fabulous writing, an interesting storyline and the warmth of these relationships. It'll make you think about your own best friends and how much you value them.

Disappointing after the wonderful ‘Home Fires’. I found this novel a bit superficial and contrived. I wanted to like the characters and ploughed on despite finding the dialogue a bit ‘ soap opera’ . I can see how this book would appeal to some people but sadly it was not for me.

I’d describe this book as realistic fiction. The author has done an amazing job at creating imaginary characters and situations that depict the world and society. The characters focus on themes of growing, self-discovery and confronting personal and social problems. This is a first for me by the author and one I enjoyed and would read more of their work. The book cover is eye-catching and appealing and would spark my interest if in a bookshop. Thank you very much to the author, publisher and Netgalley for this ARC.


3.5/5.

Best of Friends is about two women who have been friends since their youth in Pakistan. I have loved Kamila Shamsie's other novels so was excited to read this. I found it a little hard to follow though and although I finished it, it was a bit of a chore to get through.

This is a story that spans decades and is a story about friendship, culture and trauma.
I absolutely loved the relatability of Maryam and Zahra's friendship and the fact that the story just interlinked from the past to the future so well.
It's such a beautiful story that deals with difficult issues such as adolescence and the gentle nature of growing up and learning about the world's injustices.
The story starts from a seed and grew into the beautiful flower before wilting at the end. I feel very bittersweet after reading this but I definitely think it's a book worth reading.

I have only read one other book by Kamila Shamsie, that being “Home Fire”. I know that in my review of that, which was almost 5 years ago, I said I wanted to read more of her novels because I really liked it. But, for one reason and another, mainly the ever lengthening list of books I want to read that means some never seem to make it to the top of the pile, I haven’t done that, so this is just my second experience.

Unfortunately, I have to say that this one really didn’t work for me.

This is the story of two life-long friends. In the opening of the book (Karachi, 1988 - a significant year), we meet Zahra and Maryam as teenage girls and already “best of friends”. I nearly stopped reading the book after this opening section because it all feels a bit teenage/YA as girls start to experience their adult bodies (and the effect those bodies can have on men) and as they share their dreams and ambitions for their future and fight with their parents over what they can and cannot do. Then there’s some unpleasantness before we skip forward to 2019 and see the two women now in the UK holding jobs convenient for creating tension in the developing story line.

The “unpleasantness” I mentioned is actually what kept me reading at this point because the lead up to it wasn’t all that exciting to read and then the set up for the follow on seemed a bit contrived. The incident itself is the most convincing part of the book.

It feels like this second half of the book is going to investigate interesting issues around racism and politics. It sets a woman fighting against the government’s treatment of refugees against a woman courting government favour for a technology that could allow a government to keep closer tabs on its population. But to me the exploration of this felt a bit contrived and also played second fiddle to the tensions in the relationship between the two main characters. It felt a bit like the book didn’t really know which direction it wanted to go and fell between the two.

Overall, I feel that I probably would still like to read more of Shamsie’s earlier work (despite not managing to do that in the last 5 years!), but this one didn’t come together for me and was a bit of a disappointment.

My thanks to the publisher for an ARC via NetGalley.

Kamila Shamsie’s last novel “Home Fire” was a worthy winner of the 2019 Women’s Prize, a slightly uneven but politically prescient novel which used the plot of the classical play “Antigone” to explore how the themes of that play (split loyalties to state/family, the rights and responsibilities of citizenship, state law versus natural justice, female roles) are just as relevant today.

Her latest novel has some of the same themes, Anglo-Pakistani families and even a (different) fictional Conservative Home Secretary – but does not have the classical underpinning and I think suffers as a consequence and I have to say I found this a disappointing read.

Shamsie has said that the idea for a book went back to a conversation with her sister 20 or so years ago (when both were in their late 20s) and her sister said “You know, it's interesting, the friends you make in adult life are your friends because you have something in common, but your childhood friends are your friends because they've always been your friends." – and I think many of my issues in the book start with that formulation.

Firstly one of a personal lack of identification – I really do not still have any friends that were friends when I was a child.

And secondly perhaps related is that the key reason the characters in this book still have friends and meet acquaintances (one key concept in the book is the difference between the two, identified early on “Zahra had recently looked up from a dictionary to inform maryam that what the two of them had with each other was friendship, and what they had with the other six girls and twenty-two boys in class was merely ‘propinquity’ – a relationship based on physical proximity) from their school in Pakistan many decades later in a different country (England), basically because they all both come from and remain in privileged and influential circles – something that meant I struggled to even want to identify with the characters.

And thirdly because really too much of the book is a rather simple tale of friendship: starting with around 130 pages which reads like a take on Mallory Towers transported to a different country and with one slightly darker incident.

And fourthly because the author seems at pains to make sure we understand her ideas about friendship evolution in a tell-not-show way via conscious reflection on behalf of her characters, that I had perhaps not expected from a renowned literary author for example

"their laughter built, moving beyond the immediate joke into a deep laugh of joy for friendship, for each other, for the certainty that whatever happened in the world you would always have this one person, this north star, this rock, this alter ego who knew your every flaw down to your atoms and who still, despite it all, chose to stand with you and by you through everything that the world had yet to throw at you, every heartache, every disappointment, every moment of darkness. always this friendship, always its light."

The book opens around 1988 in a Karachi boarding school – with two best friends who have known each other almost their whole lives, but are now 14 (“they were conscious they were in Class 10 now, old enough for the younger students to look up to them, and also at that stage where familiarity could start to replace deference in their relationship with the A level students”) and starting their O Levels ( “how well or badly you fared in the exams that waited two years down the line would determine the life altering matter of which American or British University would want you another two years after that”) – again little is left for the reader to deduce.

Zahra is the daughter of a school teacher mother and a well-loved Cricket commentator and presenter (cricket is ever present in the novel although it speaks to the influence/privilege which infuses the book and marred my enjoyment that the main cricket scene takes place in a box at Lloyd’s with a large group of people who have flown from Pakistan for the occasion) – who in turn falls foul of Zia’s military government for not giving the latter credit for enticing Imran Khan out of retirement.

Mayram is the scion of a luxury leather dynasty – and the business patriarch (her Grandfather)’s favourite and unofficial successor (her father and other sisters lacking her business sense).

The story unfolds against General Zia’s death and at the celebrations following Bhutto’s democratic election win, Zahra and Mayram’s increasing interest in boys leads to an incident whose repercussions lose Maryam her Grandfather’s respect and her heritage and ends with her being sent to school in England.

The story then picks up in London in 2019 – and a pair of articles bring us up to speed on the two girls, who are still friends despite their political differences and both now members of the English elite.

Zahra is the head of the Centre for Civil Liberties (a “neat narrative arc from suffering through oppressive dictatorship to director of the” CCL), and well known government critic who – and the irony is not entirely albeit mostly lost on her – uses the Courts, the unelected House of Lords, the media (she has BBC journalists on speed dial, a ready seat on Question Time and Guardian profiles on tap), her friendship with celebrities (from pop stars to directors) and the money of upper class donors to oppose the democratically elected government’s increasingly authoritarian tendencies.

Maryam is a tech entrepreneur turned venture capitalist – with a particular interest in a photo-and-video sharing and face-tagging app. The app’s potential role in government surveillance, and her courting of Government influence via a very high net worth donor political club (who buy access to the Prime Minister, Chancellor and Foreign Secretary all of who feature as more or less fictionalised characters in the book) puts her friendship with Zahra at strain. And that strain is exacerbated when at the aforementioned cricket match, the other protagonists in the 1988 incident come back into their lives in what seems to be a rather contrived coincidence with neither of the two friends really acting in what I felt was a credible way.

Overall as I have implied I found this a disappointment – the author’s interest in and campaigning against the government’s asylum and civil liberty policies I think worked much better recently in her non-fiction writing (for example https://www.migrantsorganise.org/from-go-home-vans-to-rwanda-asylum-deal-a-decade-of-the-hostile-environment-a-lecture-by-author-kamila-shamsie/) than in this rather contrived novel, which is the opposite of how I felt about “Home Fire” where perhaps the classical underpinnings gave the contrivance in the plot a kind of loaned legitimacy which was lacking here.

The beginning of Best of Friends evokes the Pakistan of the late 1980s. Karachi is the setting as years of dictatorship end and the country embraces the prospect of democracy.

Shamsie captures Pakistan perfectly: a country of cricket lovers where men and women are striving for equality in their personal lives as well as their society. The novel communicates the energy of the people and the texture of their lives in this period. And there is the love affair these people have with England. Somehow the intersection between the two countries is best expressed in cricket. There is a lovely set piece late in the novel as cricket at Lords becomes a microcosm of English society.

However, although Best of Friends makes use of a very precise historical period, it tells a very personal story. Maryam and Zahra are both from rich and privileged families with properties in London, but their ambitions are different. Yet, as adolescents, their lives pivot on a late night decision at the end of a party.

The novel shows how this event of their childhood changes everything. Maryam is sent to boarding school in London and this marks a point of separation from her parents after a childhood in which she always planned to run the family business.

The novel moves forward 30 years to London in 2019, where Zahra is now a powerful woman who has lived an extraordinary adult life already. Her choices challenge the thinking of her culture and she is very much a political figure. She loves London and is battling for civil liberties for the UK, despite her Pakistani heritage.

Maryam too is very successful: a venture capitalist, based in the UK, specialising in the tech industry. Like Zahra she has made unconventional choices. They have remained friends, despite very different political standpoints.

As Zahra and Maryam take it in turns to tell the story, the reader’s sympathies are tested. Are they entirely reliable narrators? Can they trust each other? And do they have the same understanding of that trigger event that altered the course of their lives? Perhaps the title should include a question mark.

This novel teaches us about what happens to personal loyalties in a society dominated by power and politics. And it builds to a memorable ending.

Best of Friends deals with race and sexuality in an original way, but it is never overpowered by polemic.
Its epic scope never subsumes the personal friendship that sustains the plot. It remains a personal story, driven by human emotions with which we can all empathise. The novel shows how a single event can change a life. Best of Friends is a masterpiece.

I adored this novel from Kamila Shamsie - as ever, she writes about important issues in an utterly accessible and engaging way.

I'm sorry to say that this didn't work for me at all, after having loved Shamsie's 'Home Fire' and 'Burnt Shadows'. It opens in Karachi in 1988 with two fourteen year olds at school and the first half feels distinctively YA with lots of familiar material about growing into adult female bodies, competing for boys' attentions, rebelling against parents , discussing future ambitions and so on.

There's a pivotal encounter at the centre of the book which avoids melodrama and which is excellent on how young women recognise fear and the power that men may have over them in the world.

The latter sections set years later and in London are rather superficial: there are the uncovering of deeply-hidden emotions between the two women, and some rather implausible high-politicking at Chequers to enable a revenge plot.

The characters had so much potential, even if they're rather schematic in their differences but this feels like it's floundering around for a trajectory. It's probably telling that some of the most powerful writing comes in a throwaway scene set in a UK refugee deportation centre which is barely central to the plot.

Overall, this felt sadly shallow and too soap opera-ish for my tastes which is a shame as Shamsie can write with assurance and insight about the workings of power, culture, women and politics and I'd hoped for more of that here.