Best of Friends
Kamila Shamsie
Best of Friends
Kamila Shamsie
Maryam and Zahra.
In 1988 Karachi, two fourteen-year-old girls are a decade into their friendship, sharing in-jokes, secrets and a love for George Michael. As Pakistan's dictatorship falls and a woman comes to power, the world suddenly seems full of possibilities. Elated by the change in the air, they make a snap decision at a party. That night, everything goes wrong, and the two girls are powerless to change the outcome.
Zahra and Maryam.
In present-day London, two influential women remain bound together by loyalties, disloyalties, and the memory of that night, which echoes through the present in unexpected ways. Now both have power; and both have very different ideas of how to wield it - Their friendship has always felt unbreakable; can it be undone by one decision?
Review
Rosalind McClintock
You are not just in safe hands with Women’s Prize winner Kamila Shamsie, you are in the hands of an artist. Her prose is seamless, her plotting propulsive and her characters are cleverly and richly drawn.
In Best of Friends, Shamsie explores a lifelong friendship and how it shifts and changes over time. She highlights the superficiality of friendship with clever techniques such as strategic gaps in characterisation – how much can we really know of someone, Shamsie asks, even if they are our best friend or family member?
We are pulled into 1988 Karachi where the dictator is omnipresent, the heat oppressive and the lives of young women are monitored and contained. We meet Zahra and Maryam, who are, as the title suggests, the best of friends. They have been reunited at their elite co-ed school after their summer holidays. Maryam has physically matured and is turning heads, while Zahra has grown in height only. It is apparent from the beginning that although they are friends, they are also very different, whether it be in their backgrounds, physicalities, outlooks on life or temperaments. They are viewed as set characters: the troublemaker and the good girl. However, at critical times these characters blur and cross over. The first half of the story builds to a single incident with some boys, which, along with the subsequent fallout, changes the trajectory of Zahra and Maryam’s lives and cements their differing world views.
We are privy to these views once again when we meet them in London in 2019, where both women are successful in their careers and still in touch. The past comes back to haunt them and what didn’t ruin their friendship and lives the first time, just might this time around.
For me the first half of Best of Friends was the strongest. I could see, feel and almost taste the city and the lives and anxieties of the two girls. Maryam and Zahra come to life in their chaotic city, whereas in London, they seem to take on the cold hardness of their surroundings. Perhaps that reflects their process of ageing or of shutting down emotionally. Or perhaps it is a narrative device. Whatever it is, the contrast has stuck with me, and the minutiae of Shamsie’s 1988 Karachi remains vivid in my mind.
Rosalind McClintock is the marketing manager at Readings.
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