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** SHORTLISTED FOR THE INDIE BOOK AWARDS 2023 ** CHOSEN AS A BEST BOOK OF 2022 BY THE GUARDIAN, OBSERVER, DAILY MAIL, FINANCIAL TIMES AND IRISH TIMES **

‘A profound novel about friendship. I loved it to pieces’ – Madeline Miller
‘A shining tour de force’ – Ali Smith, Guardian Summer Reading
‘An intimate study of the ties that bind us’ – Stylist
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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

Sometimes it was as though the forty years of friendship between them was just a lesson in the unknowability of other people…

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?
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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

Publisher Review

Kamila Shamsie's new novel Best of Friends (Bloomsbury, October) - a story that begins in Karachi in 1988 - looks set to be one of the highlights * FINANCIAL TIMES, BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2022 * Friendship and power collide in Best of Friends * GUARDIAN, BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2022 * 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 * A haunting novel which asks big questions about justice, class, and the borders of our moral selves, all wrapped around the deliciously absorbing story of a childhood friendship that endures - fun, complicated, the kind of friendship that feels elemental -- MEGHA MAJUMDAR, author of A BURNING A number of authors are publishing the successors to notable hits. Kamila Shamsie follows Home Fire with Best of Friends * NEW STATESMAN, BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2022 * PRAISE FOR HOME FIRE: The book for our times -- Judges of the Women's Prize 2017 Home Fire has lit a light that'll never go out -- Ali Smith Her prose is propulsive and unfailingly elegant, and her eye for detail is acute ... A brave and brilliant novel * Sunday Times * Managed to do all the things I want novels to do - tell me something about the world, give me a tiny glimpse into the otherness of others, and, most of all, give me that ache of longing as I turned the last page and realised I would never meet these characters again -- Tahmima Anam * Observer * Shamsie's writing resonates on the human, political and lyrical plane but its topicality, tight plot and vivid characterisation also suggest a film script in the making * New Statesman, Books of the Year * Elegant and evocative ... A powerful exploration of the clash between society, family and faith in the modern world, tipping its hat to the same dilemma in the ancient one * Guardian * Builds to one of the most memorable final scenes I've read in a novel this century ... There is high, high music in the air at the end of Home Fire * New York Times * Utterly contemporary and deeply original too -- Arifa Akbar * Evening Standard * One of the best novels of the year ... magnificent ... Insistently intelligent without becoming didactic ... conveyed in prose of stunning suppleness and economy ... Home Fire is everything literary fiction should be - an exciting, beautiful, profound novel of lasting value that deserves laurels * Spectator * A host of our most admired literary novelists return in 2022 ... Look out, too, for Kamila Shamsie's Best Of Friends * DAILY MAIL, BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2022 *