الصديقتان

by Kamila Shamsie, الحارث النبهان (ترجمة)

Signed Edition

A dazzling new novel of friendship, identity and the unknowability of other people - from the international bestselling author of Home Fire, winner of the Women's Prize for Fiction.

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.

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary, Book Club, Friendship, Pakistan, Literary Fiction, LGBT

304 pages

First published September 27, 2022

About the author

Kamila Shamsie was born in 1973 in Karachi, where she grew up. She has a BA in Creative Writing from Hamilton College in Clinton, NY and an MFA from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. While at the University of Massachusetts she wrote In The City By The Sea , published by Granta Books UK in 1998. This first novel was shortlisted for the John Llewelyn Rhys Award in the UK, and Shamsie received the Prime Minister’s Award for Literature in Pakistan in 1999. Her 2000 novel Salt and Saffron led to Shamsie’s selection as one of Orange’s “21 Writers of the 21st Century.” With her third novel, Kartography , Shamsie was again shortlisted for the John Llewelyn Rhys award in the UK. Both Kartography and her next novel, Broken Verses , won the Patras Bokhari Award from the Academy of Letters in Pakistan. Burnt Shadows, Shamsie’s fifth novel, has been longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. Her books have been translated into a number of languages.

Shamsie is the daughter of literary critic and writer Muneeza Shamsie, the niece of celebrated Indian novelist Attia Hosain, and the granddaughter of the memoirist Begum Jahanara Habibullah. A reviewer and columnist, primarily for the Guardian, Shamsie has been a judge for several literary awards including The Orange Award for New Writing and The Guardian First Book Award. She also sits on the advisory board of the Index on Censorship.

For years Shamsie spent equal amounts of time in London and Karachi, while also occasionally teaching creative writing at Hamilton College in New York State. She now lives primarily in London.

Reviews

[Jessica Woodbury · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is about the wrong thing. It's a bummer. The beginning is alive and interesting, deep in the friendship of two girls who have very different families and lives and personalities. It's clear, though, that the book is using this as set dressing. That ultimately it is going to take us to something bigger. Unfortunately, it's this first section that is the book at its best, in 1988 Karachi, getting into the day to day of their lives and the strangeness of being a teenager just starting to understand the world just as the whole world is changing.

The concept of danger, of what could happen to two teenage girls in a conservative, patriarchal dictatorship even when they come from relatively well off families and have a nice school, is what is so enticing about the book when it is good. Their dawning understanding of the peril that they are in, of the danger that is inherent when you are a woman in the world, is captivating. They react to this quite differently. They are drawn to danger and repulsed by it. Zahra, the more prim of the girls, keeps her desires secret. Maryam, from a very wealthy family, is more cavalier and willing to take risks.

There is a pivotal scene in the middle of the book, and then we fast forward several decades. And from here on out the book is no longer all that interesting, sadly. This one incident is treated as if it is the most important thing that ever happened, but I didn't really believe it. Maryam in particular sees it as the one thing that changed her whole life. And while it did impact the trajectory of her life, it really only messed with the details. Maryam's obsession is inconsistent with her adult life (both women are wildly successful, ridiculously so, to a level that is hard to believe) and her years of adult experience. And once these girls are women, with their lives all set, with everything so comfortable, no longer feeling like they are actually in any danger, it is unclear why we are here and what it adds to the story. The elements Shamsie brings back, the past returning, are not very effective. Everything just kind of falls apart. I sped through the end just to be done, honestly.

This clearly feels like a structure book when what it is good at is the character and slice of life. It is interesting to see these two girls be so close when we can already see the cracks between them. It is much less interesting to see them still be close decades later, when it's hard to believe that all these fissures have just sat dormant for so long, that none of this ever bubbled up earlier, that they have just gotten along great for all these years. The structure feels false, it feels like a constructed fiction, instead of feeling organic.

[Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer · Rating 2 out of 5]

Kamia 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.

Or

Childhood friendship really was the most mysterious of all relationships, maryam thought, as she signalled Zola to get up and clear the plates; it was built around rules that didn’t extend to any other pairing in life. you weren’t tied by blood, or profession, or an enmeshed domesticity or even – as was the case with friendships made in adulthood – much by way of common interests.

The book opens around 1988 in a Karachi private 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 Lord’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...) 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.

My thanks to Bloomsbury for an ARC via NetGalley

[Roman Clodia · Rating 2 out of 5]

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 old girls 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.

Thanks to the publisher for an ARC via NetGalley

[Cecily · Rating 3 out of 5]

In 1988 Karachi, two 14 year olds have been best of friends for a decade. Zahra is academically brilliant, and solidly middle class. Maryam will inherit the Khan Leather empire. Thirty one years later, they both live in London. Still very different. Still best of friends.

Enduring friendship

“Perhaps that was the key to the longevity of childhood friendships - all those shared subtexts that no one else could discern… You weren’t tied by blood, or profession.”

My oldest friendships go back to when we were 11. Our teen years in a repressive setting (boarding school) in the early 1980s have some similarities with those of Maryam and Zahra. Decades later, a handful of us are still best of friends. The “shared subtexts” are a shorthand and a bond.

“The problem with childhood friendships was that you could sometimes fail to see the adult in front of you.”
My friends and I are all recognisably the same people: we have experienced and learned a lot, but really we have just grown into ourselves: the adult is not so very different from the teen. I find that reassuring. Most importantly, we’re still connected, even when we’re far apart geographically, and don’t see each other for several months.


Image: “Landscape Sculpture” by Barbara Hepworth, 1944. I love the curves and colours, but note the wires connecting across the distance. (Source)

Disappointing

Having enjoyed Home Fire (see my review HERE), my expectations of this were high.

Unfortunately, most of the first half felt like a competent novel for 14 year olds: puberty, parties, boys, exams, parental rules, “girlfear”, marking the dirty bits in racy novels, and lustful interior monologues, with nothing very original beyond its location and time of political flux (General Zia murdered and Benazhir Bhutto elected).

Towards the end of the first half, the naïve recklessness of teens leads to a scary and unforgettable situation.

They, and their friendship, survive. The second half provides some catch-up via a mock Guardian interview with Zahra. After that, it self-consciously checks too many contemporary issues: lesbian parenthood, trial by social media, a fleeting trans character, dot com venture capital, safety versus privacy, CCTV and facial recognition, inter-racial relationships, corruption in high places, immigration and refugees, sexting, and, obviously, racism and patriarchy.

Repercussions of that evening more than thirty years ago unexpectedly confront them afresh. This could have been powerful and insightful, but the essence of what tied and divided Zahra and Maryam was lost in the noise. So much for subtext.


Image: Consequences rebounding from the past made me think of tsunamis, earthquakes, and continental drift - specifically, divergence (Source)

“Zahra all straight lines and Maryam all curves, adding another element to their study in contrasts.”
Maybe structuring it like two different novels, for different readers, was a literary device to echo the differences between Zahra and Maryam. Maybe.

Quotes

• “In a nation of oppression and losses cricket was a blazing light.”

• “Justice isn’t gentle, but it is necessary.”

• “When you’re achingly middle class, the racist shit of your childhood is largely metaphorical.”

• “Meeting schoolfriends… after a gap of many years was a constant interplay between familiarity and strangeness.”

[Ellie Hamilton · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.75
This author can write and it was very compelling but by the end I felt it fell flat compared to the strength of the friendship theme it had in the first half.

[Shannon (The Book Club Mom) · Rating 2 out of 5]

Oh boy. Let me start off by saying that writing a less than favorable book review is not fun for me. I hate it. It’s my least favorite thing to do as a book reviewer. But I take pride in sharing my honest thoughts, so here it goes:

This one was a bit of a snooze fest. The writing was stiff, dry, and disjointed. The plot bored me to tears, and was very uneventful. The character development was severely lacking. I had trouble telling the two friends apart, and kept mixing up their storylines. Near the end, I did a lot of skimming. I just wanted the novel to be over. Overall, this novel was poorly executed, and I should’ve DNF’ed it.

[Amirah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ignore all the reviews from people who loved Shamsie's Homefire but were disappointed by this — Best of Friends provides more incisive commentary on how class, culture, and gender intersect within the South Asian (in particular Pakistani) diaspora and another incredibly (literally, incredibly) contemporary look at British politics all wrapped up in a story about female friendship. I tore through this three weeks ago and am still thinking about it today.

[Neil · Rating 2 out of 5]

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.

[Bridget · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Ari Levine · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5, rounded down. This was a near-complete misfire from a genuinely talented novelist, whose novels I have generally enjoyed, especially her last, Home Fire.

Best of Friends starts out promisingly as an intimate Ferrante-esque story of the friendship of two 14-year-old girls, bookish Zahra and extroverted Maryam who attend a posh private school in 1988 Karachi, when Zia's dictatorship gave way to Benazir Bhutto's democratically-elected government.

Growing up in a patriarchal society and sheltered by well-connected families, the girls are unprepared to reckon with the real-life outcomes of their sexual interest in boys, and their sexual attractiveness to unsavory men. In the novel's pivotal and life-changing incident, Shamsie builds the suspense and danger as Zahra and Maryam narrowly avert disaster as they careen around the nighttime city in a car driven by a dangerous and petulant older boy.

The rest of the novel is a dull, plodding YA-adjacent melodrama set in contemporary London, where Zahra is now an earnest left-wing human rights lawyer defending her clients from deportation, and Maryam is a shady venture capitalist currying favor with surveillance tech companies and an authoritarian Tory government. The adult Zahra and Maryam talk and think a great deal about their friendship, and ponder friendship in the abstract (in especially heavy-handed asides from the omniscient narrator).

The heavy-handed plot contrivances pile up, as negative forces from their past return to haunt them, while their privilege and wealth insulates them (yet again) from the destructive consequences that their careless narcissism and situational ethics have inflicted upon the innocent and the guilty.

[Jonathan Pool · Rating 3 out of 5]

At the second of two book launch readings which I attended this week, Kamila Shamsie was asked (nicely) to comment on whether Best of Friends was both a book with serious themes, but also a “beach read”. Given Shamsie’s political activism, and the strong literary critical response to her prize winning Home Fire , her last novel, this was an interesting and potentially provocative question. Shamsie did not demur.
My response to this book is one of ambivalence.

• As a book about friendship (exclusively around female friendship) it is a story with universal appeal, and one that fosters discussion. We all have some insight in this field. First friendship? Life long friendship? Challenges and threats to long held friendships? In this respect “beach read” is applicable, and not simply as a pejorative description.

• As a book reflecting our times, and from a specifically female perspective in the #metoo era. Kamila Shamsie has coined the term “girl fear” to express the idea that for women, the fear of attack is all pervasive.

• As a political book. The story divides equally between Karachi, Pakistan, and London. Pakistan under the dictatorship of General Zia-al-Haq gave way to the presidency of thirty five year old Benazir Bhutto. This at a time when Kamila Shamsie was fifteen. The two leading girls/women in this book (Maryam and Zahra) are fourteen at the outset. The sense of oppression in Pakistan is well referenced, not least in a cricket anecdote concerning Zahra’s father.
In London the political elite are portrayed as duplicitous, self serving and devoid of conscience. This was a book written in the immediate post Brexit years and during the Covid crisis, so the cynical view of government at that time is perhaps understandable!

My notes from back to back readings with very different interviewers in very different settings:

With Nesrine Malik, Southbank, London 28.09.2022

• Book started out as childhood friendship rather than female friendship.
• Adult friendships are of a type. Childhood friends from all over the place.
• Older you get the more you want to talk to other women (in this patriarchal world)
• The girls aged 14; the first time there are silences and secrets as the body changes.
• Maryam is in a state of exception. Family know the police.
• “Class immunity” in both Pakistan and UK (interviewer phrase). To be easy socially and all that comes from it. Recognisable across nations.
• Different responses to Zia’s death. Maryam apologising got him
• Negotiation. Women have power but there are limits. There is a woman prime Minister in UK, but women can’t walk through Regents Park at night.
• Moment you move from exciting to terrifying. KS has spoken to lots of women. In the book “girl fear”. Vulnerability. Don’t make wrong decision.
• Diversity is promoted at the top, but underneath the surface attitudes don’t need to change. Let’s do business.
• Video shop VCR culture. The master pressing not the pirate copy was the one most sought after
• 1980s time of optimism: Mandela; Berlin Wall; end Cold War
• With a deep and unshakeable love, a friendship can survive anything, even very different life outlooks.
• Audience Question: advocacy for Palestine? Answer: Supports BDS
• Audience Question:Which of the characters is KS . Neither. I sit in a room reading and writing and I am not interested in looking at me. Interested in my times.
• Audience Question: The writing process. Not a planner but always knows the final sentence of her books .


With Alex Clarke, Marlborough Literary festival 01.10.2022

• Maryam. Upper Middle Class- who regard themselves as an exception to the rules. This is evident in Pakistan and in London. Zahra is class ‘adjacent’. Interested in how the powerful can have normal private lives but public ruthlessness
• 1988 KS was 15. Initial reaction to death of Zia-al-Haq, was fear. With him you knew what was coming next. Then Benazir Bhutto , as a young girl was exhilarating. Excitement. Endless possibilities..
• “Girl fear”. Example of beach being the safest place in Karachi, unlike the City.
• Telephones. Nobody spoke openly; no criticism. Somebody might be listening.
• Writing ran in KS family. The Lion the Witch and The Wardrobe. Also read Jackie Collins. Her mother clever, and did not discourage, said well-done you might like Remains of the Day next.. Night Benazir elected KS walked through the wardrobe.
• Adolescent memories. Video shop “culture”. Felt shame when owner said film “Bull Durham” was not appropriate. Maryam in the book finds a new video shop when she receives a video shop rebuff..
• In the book the girls feel shame, thirty years later. But who was responsible?
• Imig app.(like Instagram with facial recognition). Molly Russell algorithm horribly prescient. Like judging the audience at an event. As you get a response and test the response, you give them more.
• In the book the two girls grew up in a surveillance society, and now here it is in the UK in both their lives. Is this unwanted surveillance, or necessary visibility?
• Cricket is a metaphor for everything!

[Royce · Rating 2 out of 5]

DNF- Home Fire was so engaging, clever, and well-written. This was a struggle to read the 70 pages that I did read. It felt as though this book was written by a different writer.

[Jill · Rating 3 out of 5]

A few years ago, I raved about a book – Home Fire – a mesmerizing story of star-crossed lovers in the crossfires of a particularly intense time in Pakistan. The author was Kamila Shamsie and I couldn’t wait to read her next novel.

Best of Friends starts off with a lot of promise. The two young besties, Maryam and Zahra, come from two different social classes in Karachi. Maryam is slated to take over the family business, Khan’s Leather, and has spent her young life sheltered, imperious, and entitled. Zahra, whose father is a popular Cricket television commentator who has gotten on the bad side of General Zia’s military dictatorship, has to study harder and walk the line a lot more tightly.

As in Home Fire, certain themes begin to form: a country in flux. ambition vs. humanity, loyalty vs. self-preservation, patriarchal power vs. female justice. The girls find themselves in a potentially dangerous situation and the outcome of that evening will reveal their characters and will change everything.

Fast forward. We meet the girls many years later in London, where both have
reached the pinnacle of professional success. Maryam has gravitated to the world of venture capitalism while Zahra is a lauded human rights attorney. Still, their childhood friendship endures. Shamsie writes, “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.”

Fair enough. But here is where my interest began to wane. As adults, their values, interests, and what matters to them displays a wide divergence. Perhaps, as Shamsie suggests, the problem with childhood friendship is that you fail to see the adult in front of you because you have such a fixed idea of who your friend is in the past. But the author places a lot of weight on the permanence of early friendships while as most of us have learned, some of these are mean to endure while others do not.

Both women show that they have the resilience and strength to overcome childhood obstacles and rise to the top of their professions. Yet inconceivably, they cannot let the situation go and are still mired to the past – which becomes crystal clear when some figures from that night emerge. By then, their stellar lives and their confrontations feel a bit false, as if they’re being plotted, rather than organic. I ceased believing in their authenticity.

I owe a debt of gratitude to Riverhead Books for enabling me to be an early reader in exchange for an honest review.

[Traci Thomas · Rating 3 out of 5]

There’s something very readable about Shamsies books. She captures dialogue and tension really well. This one lagged in the third quarter but was solid overall. I’m not sure it was as interesting as I would’ve liked. The central questions just weren’t worthy to me.

And yes, I read HOME FIRE and loved it. This book is much lower stakes and more reserved.

[Joy D · Rating 4 out of 5]

As the story opens, the two protagonists, Zahra and Maryam, are fourteen years old living in Karachi in 1988. Though they come from quite different circumstances, they are best friends experiencing the usual teenage concerns. Zahra makes a decision that puts them in a dangerous situation, resulting in a change in the trajectories of their lives.

The narrative then shifts to 2019. Zahra and Maryam have taken different paths, and we find them in London. They are in their forties and still friends, but at opposite ends of the political spectrum. The storyline follows the changes in their friendship and how difficult it can be to maintain when values differ. The political situations in both Pakistan and the UK form the backdrop to both timelines.

Themes include migration issues, justice, convictions, betrayal, and loyalty. Kamila Shamsie writes beautifully. I felt invested in the narrative, especially the first three-quarters of the book. The ending was not quite what I expected, but it makes a point that is particularly relevant in today’s society.

[Anum Shaharyar · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is proof that I should try to write my reviews as soon as I’m done reading something, because six months down the line my notes don’t make much sense to me. I have a vague memory of enjoying this title – maybe because there’s not much Kamila Shamsie can write that I won’t like – but there’s a difference between liking something and loving it, and I was clearly not enamoured with this one, given that I barely remember most of it.

The first thing I did was a quick google search in the hopes of jogging my old-person memory, but the blurb proved to be of no help at all. It mentions two best friends, and that much I did remember: in this book there are two girls who grow up together, who are very close, and who for some reason (what was the reason?) find themselves on opposing sides in some battle about… what exactly? I have absolutely no idea.

How is it that I managed to retain absolutely nothing about this tale?

“But for Maryam, university was just an interruption before she could take over the family business. The only future that mattered to her was the one that would unfold in Karachi, a city to which Zahra had no intention of returning once she’d left it.”

That the story is about friendship, and in particular about female friendship, should come as no surprise to anyone who’s been reading Shamsie’s works as of late. Read enough of her novels and you’ll realize this is something that’s particularly close to her heart: the concept of platonic relationships and how they affect our decisions and our life paths, analyzed in a manner that very few other Pakistani authors do. Her last few novels have featured a lot of female friendships, either through her own realization about how important they are as she became older, or due to a burgeoning awakening led by social media conversations around the importance of female ties. Whatever it may be, I’m all for stories that focus on this particular dynamic, except of course for the fact that the careful dissection in this particular work of Shamsie left me completely unmoved and with no recollection of it whatsoever.

“By contrast, whatever happened to Maryam today wouldn’t matter very much. She’d still inherit a business and a place in society. The rich lived in a different universe.”

That the girls come from different backgrounds was something I recalled once I read the blurb, in a manner very reminiscent of the sort of class analysis Shamsie loves to explore in her novels. This idea of humans acting in a certain manner because of their wealth and privilege is also something that comes up very regularly in Shamsie’s works, although it mostly stays in the background — or maybe it was discussed in more detail in this one? Who knows?

Certainly not me.

“Perhaps friendship was not only about what you said to each other, but also about what you didn't.”

I think the one thing I did notice, and which the book ironically is named after, was the friendship, which never really created any emotion in me. This was funny because it does seem like the whole basis of the plot was the fact that these girls were oh so very close to each other. But throughout the book I remember feeling like I never really felt any of that closeness that the book lays claim to, and while I admire the idea of what Shamsie tried to do, I do believe I’ve read better depictions of female friendship in a hundred other iterations.

So while it’s not a crime to not be able to depict relationships in a way that other people recognize (all personal ties are subjective to our lived experiences, so on and so forth), it does matter whether the reader believes in the friendship you are basing your entire premise on, and this reader, very sadly, didn’t.

“You don’t mind the exclusivity, you just mind that you aren’t part of it, Layla had said once, as if this was a Maryam-specific attitude rather than absolutely everyone’s objection to exclusivity.”

The book also had the usual Shamsie tropes of Muslim characters in name only with their barely-there religious inclinations, rich characters with their unbelievable levels of privilege being flaunted, and all the various possible combinations of desi-related triteness that can be found in any Pakistani novel, such as class divisions and cricket and heat. I think the problem with reading novels from a country with such limited literary output is that on the one hand, everything is a cliche, but on the other hand, it is very hot! We are obsessed with cricket! Our class issues are systemic and never-ending! Which just goes to show that the problem with proper representation is that while all those things are true, in the absence of other narratives, they become the only thing that is true, and that is where the problem lies.

“Cricket told you that talent and grit and character would win out, that giants could be felled, that today’s defeat could always be followed by tomorrow’s victory. Yes, there were errors and injustices, cruelty even. But beyond that was the game itself, radiant and untainted.”

In the end I genuinely have no idea what the ending of the book was or whether I enjoyed it, because the blurb went on being unhelpful by mentioning a ‘fateful night’ that changes the course of this friendship and ‘troubling figures’ that emerge in the future decades later. What? When? Who? Trying to write this review is both a humbling and an enlightening experience, not only because it shows me how weak my memory is when it comes to certain plotlines, but also because it clarifies clearly how our experience of a book can change over time. I rated this book a lofty 3 out of 5 stars, which is a pretty high scale overall by my standards, and yet a few months down the line it’s clearly not a tale that stuck with me as something memorable, so if you enjoy something momentarily but it doesn’t really leave a mark on you, was it even good in the first place?

“She was filled with the satisfaction of being with a group of people and knowing the words and tone that would produce exactly the effect you wanted. This was what was meant by belonging and home.”

In conclusion, after having remembered barely any of it, I’m going to go with my gut instinct and say that it was still a passably decent read. With all these arguments about social media destroying our brains and the mental gymnastics I perform daily with my bilingual full-time job/tutoring sessions/household management, I’m going to give myself some grace and trust the judgement of my past self, who gave this book a good rating, not knowing future me would be struggling so. Just because something doesn’t leave an indelible mark on you doesn't mean it wasn’t worth it in the moment, and every single thing we experience doesn’t need to be life changing.

How’s that for a life lesson from a book you can’t even remember?

***

I review Pakistani fiction when I can. The rest of them are up here.

[Nadia · Rating 3 out of 5]

العمل عن الصداقة و عن الجانب الخفي منها .
مريم و زهرة صديقتين نبدأ معهما القصة و هما على أعتاب المراهقة في باكستان في فترة الثمانينات و من خلفيتين اجتماعية مختلفة حيث الرابط بينهما المدرسة الراقية المميزة فنتعرف على كل واحدة منهما و عن عالمهما الداخلي و مشاكلهما و ذلك عبر تقنية ثنائية الرواة فننتقل من حياة مريم إلى حياة زهرة بكل سلاسة إلى أن نصل إلى الذروة الأولى في الحكاية: تعرضهما لحادث في حفلة بين الأصدقاء و التي شكلت منعطفا في مسار حياتهما لتفترق بينهما السبل و نعود لمشهد يجمعهما في لندن في 2019 ونستكمل معهما الحكاية حيث كل منهما بنت لنفسها عالمها الخاص( و ان بقيتا مترابطتين ) و نربط حاضرهما بماضيهما و مع الذروة ال��انية و المرتبطة بما وقع في تلك الحفلة في الماضي نكون أمام مواجهة بين الصديقتين لننتهي بفراقهما.
العمل يستند على ثيمة أساسية هي الصداقة و الولاء كحامل لاحداث الرواية مع اعتبار و جود ثيمات تحيل على الخياة السياسية و الفساد السياسي سواء في باكستان او انجلترا .
يمكن ملاحظة ان الرواية في بعض أجواءها عرفت تمطيطا في الأحداث جعلها تسقط في الرتابة و لكن سرعان ما تداركتها الكاتبة.
ثاني تجربة لي مع الكاتبة في انتظار تجارب أخرى .

[switterbug (Betsey) · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Perhaps that was the key to the longevity of childhood friendships—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.”

Zahra and Maryam both grew up in Karachi, Pakistan. Maryam’s wealthy family gave open arms to Zahra, the daughter of a celebrity cricket anchor who didn’t make a lot of money, but was known by everyone. Best friends since age 4, the ties that bound them were fierce, close, and tight, including one night when they were 14 years old, and they became scared for their lives.

As adults, both women live in London, and both have important, influential positions of power. Within their busy lives, they always made time for each other. They had their disputes, their ups and downs, but through it all, their lives were contiguous and steadfast. Shamsie’s intelligent writing conveys the main events and the subtexts of their friendship.

This is a largely subtle novel with gradual disclosures. If you are expecting explosive events and abundant action, you may be disappointed. Much here occurs below the surface of their lives, within their memories, proclivities, and sensibilities. The narrative is thoughtful and reflective more than exciting.

The author slowly loops in how each friend’s nature creates the chemistry around their relationship, sometimes positive, but at other times, a recurrent darkness pervades, just under the surface—those subtexts that convulse and threaten to rupture.

My topmost complaint is the lack of tension in the pacing and an absence of pressure. When the climax came, it felt a bit anticlimactic, and I was impatient for an organic thrust of emotion. The second half of the book was more expositive, and I kept wishing for more showing than telling.

However, Shamsie’s deft sense of nuance remained with me when I closed the book. This morning, I found myself deliberating the ways in which the story was also epic. It begins right before the assassination of General Zia in 1988, which gave rise to the first democratic leader (and a woman) of a Muslim country, Benazir Bhutto. It ends on an enigmatic note during the first spring of the pandemic.

Regarding friendships: “…it was built around rules that didn’t extend to any other pairing in life. You weren’t tied by blood, or profession, or an enmeshed domesticity, or even—as was the case with friedships made in adulthood—much by way of common interests.”

3.5 rounded up

A huge thank you to Riverhead Books for sending me an ARC for review.

[Linda · Rating 5 out of 5]

I thought I wasn't going to like this but I was hooked immediately. The portrayal of complicated relationships is amazing.

[vin · Rating 1 out of 5]

narratively terrible, poorly characterised, tries to do too much at once and ends up doing nothing, ends terribly, too many plot lines that go nowhere, unnecessary time jump, unrealistic, extremely unlikeable characters and i could go on and on and on–

not even the karachi parts can make me give this anything except one star. maybe i’m being uncharitable because an author on her latest book, after many years of writing would have the foresight to not give us another DHA drama about rich kids who love springsteen and conveniently always move away from karachi (cough:kartography) to achieve nothing that means anything.

shamsie is not capable of seeing karachi as a place where things can conclude, this is the third book ive read where the story is split into two halves that barely intersect – her writing is the most alive when it is about karachi but as soon as she traverses beyond that it becomes flat, ill-researched and an impostor.

it’s not that i don’t believe pakistan has produced some high-class snobs with a penchant for the posh and pomp of british politics, it is that kamila shamsie writes from an extremely white POV, reducing her protagonists to one-dimensional women that have nothing pakistani about them except the occasional urdu phrase or occasional mention of karachi and the beach

if this is the state of litfic in pakistan we need someone to step in immediately

p.s. the prose was okay at best

[Zainab Ahmed · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF @ 36 pages because this is awful. It feels like a man obsessed with pubescent girls wrote this 🤮🤮🤮

[diamond · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really, really did not enjoy how disconnected the first half and second half of this book felt. I loved the first part and how engaging it was. The second half just didn't have as much charm.

[Anna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kamila Shamsie is brilliant, this was so good and so moving and so wonderful to read something that centres friendship so fully.

[Keelia · Rating 3 out of 5]

After having written my thesis on Home Fire I was kind of nervous going into this one after so long avoiding Shamsie’s books (due to my thesis mental breakdown, not her writing). This one felt kind of… very mid?? I often found it difficult to determine if it was Maryam or Zahra’s point of view as their voices sounded so similar, especially when they were in the same scene. It was interesting where their lives had led after the pivotal event in the middle of the book, but it also felt like it did nothing with it until a big blow up at the end that was abruptly resolved and with a time jump to spring 2020 for an epilogue.
I find Shamsie’s obvious interest in politics, the media, and diaspora fascinating to read and think about, however I just think that Home Fire did it better.

[Gemma · Rating 2 out of 5]

I am always on the lookout for books that depict realistic and positive female friendship. This was the main reason I was drawn to this book as it promised an interesting story centered around a friendship between Maryam and Zahra, spanning forty years.

The book opens in 1988 Karachi where we meet Maryam and Zahra as 14 year old girls experiencing puberty, first crushes and school drama against the backdrop of political change. The fears and difficulties of becoming young women who draw the attention of men around them is depicted really well and is woven well into the somewhat YA descriptions of their day to day lives.

The story then moves to London in the present day with the girls now grown up and living with the ghosts of their shared past and a night that changed everything. My biggest issue with this part of the story was that I didn't feel like I got to know the girls well enough in the first part to really connect with them and so the whole story just fell flat for me.

On the whole, this was a very slow paced book and I was quite frequently bored as the character depth was lacking and little of interest happened in the plot for long sections so it felt like a slog to get through at times. It is a shame as there were some intriguing and clever themes at play but it didn't feel like they were used to their full potential.

Thank you to Readers First for the copy of this book.

[Nidhi Shrivastava · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was blown away by Homefire, and this novel did not disappoint. It reminded me of how many South Asian authors are exploring how relationships transform and shift in the diaspora. In her latest novel, Kamila Shamshie explores the theme of friendship as it is shaped by socio-cultural politics over three decades in Pakistan and UK.

The two main characters, Maryam and Zahra, when they are both 14 years old in 1988, during the end of Zia Ul-Haq’s reign to Benazir Bhutto. While Maryam comes from a wealthy and politically well connected family, Zahra is the daughter of sports journalist and school principal. While their class status does not affect their friendship, it is Maryam’s relationship with Hamad that transforms their friendship.

In 2019, both of them migrate to London but lead very different professional lives. Maryam works as a successful venture capitalist with ties to the right wing government while Zahra is an advocate for human and civil rights, who is appalled by the same government’s treatment of immigrants and the rise of populism.

Shamshie‘s novel is a contemporary look into today’s society globally in which politics often shape and determine the longevity of a friendship. In this evocative, mesmerizing, and thought-provoking novel, Shamshie asks us to reflect on whether we can be friends with someone who holds different and often opposing views.

It is no surprise that Shamshie is an auto-buy author for me.

[Ann · Rating 3 out of 5]

This novel tells the story of two Pakistani teenage girls who are best friends. They attend a good school and we watch them go through a number of teenage passages and issues. Underlying their teenage years is Pakistani politics, which affects each girl’s family differently. Both women wind up in London as young adults and the second half of the novel deals with their life as powerful adult women in London. One is a venture capitalist and one is a human rights advocate. They remain best friends, but, of course, their different life paths lead to collisions. I enjoyed this novel but not as much as some of this author’s prior work. It wasn’t bad – but it did not move me deeply.

[Rhona Osbaldeston · Rating 1 out of 5]

Didn't enjoy this

Found the two lead characters unlikeable as 14 year olds and they grew into unlikeable adults. Boring story that didn't really say much to me about friendship more about one spoilt child expecting to get anything she wanted and if anyone crossed her they were dealt with. Both girls had a smugness about them which I found very unpleasant - the story, what there of it, was fizzled into nothing -

[Molly Ferguson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great book about a friendship through the years and in different places and circumstances, and how an incident in adolescence can reverberate through lives. I enjoyed getting to know both Zehra and Maryam in their younger and older selves. I also enjoyed the different takes on inhabiting a brown woman’s body in different positions of class, sexuality, temperament, etc.

[Erika Pensaert · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked the first part of the book. The second part is mainly about politics and principles and the story disappeares into the background.