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Description
'A profound novel about friendship. I loved it to pieces' MADELINE MILLER
** SHORTLISTED FOR THE INDIE BOOK AWARDS 2023 ** PICKED AS ONE OF THE SUNDAY TIMES' BEST PAPERBACKS OF 2023** CHOSEN AS A BOOK TO LOOK OUT FOR BY THE GUARDIAN, BBC, OBSERVER, DAILY MAIL, IRISH TIMES AND FINANCIAL TIMES **
Sometimes it was as though the forty years of friendship between them was just a lesson in the unknowability of other people…
In 1988, as Pakistan is on the brink of political overhaul, two fourteen year-old girls are on the brink of womanhood. Their Arcadian days of secrets, laughter and a shared love for George Michael are brought crashing down when a snap decision at a party changes their lives forever.
Years later in London, Zahra and Maryam are women with money, power and influence. They are both, however, still haunted by that night all those years ago.
Insightful and unsettling, Best of Friends employs sumptuous prose to unpick the seams of a forty-year friendship and illuminate the ripple-like effects of power and history.
'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
Product details
Published | 19 Jun 2025 |
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Format | Paperback |
Edition | 1st |
Extent | 336 |
ISBN | 9781526680044 |
Imprint | Bloomsbury Circus |
Dimensions | 198 x 129 mm |
Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
About the contributors
Reviews
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A profound novel about friendship. I loved it to pieces
MADELINE MILLER
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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
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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
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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
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Friendship and power collide in Best of Friends
GUARDIAN, BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2022
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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