A complicated bond: The Best of Friends, by Kamila Shamsie, reviewed

When I think of Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire, I picture a pot boiling on a hob, the water level rising until it spills over the lip and onto the stove. In Best of Friends, the author’s seventh novel, the tension is still there, but the bubbles are contained. It’s more of a simmer, gentle but insistent – not unlike the ‘shared subtexts’ that pass between the protagonists.

We first meet Maryam and Zahra as 14-year-olds. It’s the summer of 1988 in Karachi and the two girls are preoccupied with standard teenage stuff (budding bodies, boys) and the kind of concerns that sadly become standard when living under a ‘repellent dictator’ (censored television, bomb and riot alarms, everyday violence). Maryam is wealthy, with a ‘casual attitude to academics’. Zahra is hard-working and needs to gain a scholarship if she’s to fulfil her dream of attending a top-tier university in Britain or America. The future looks bright when General Zia, who seized power in a military coup, dies, and a young woman, Benazir Bhutto, becomes prime minister. ‘It feels like more things are possible in the world than I’d believed,’ says Zahra. Excited by the prospect of something new, she makes a snap decision at a party celebrating a democratic Pakistan that puts the two friends in a compromising position and sees Maryam shipped off to boarding school.

Shamsie, who was raised in Karachi and lives in London, sticks with the 14-year-olds in Pakistan until this fateful night, which takes place almost halfway through the book. The narrative then skips forward to 2019. The pair are living in London – Maryam in Primrose Hill, Zahra in ‘one of the unlovelier stretches’ north-west. And yet Zahra has made herself ‘exactly what she’d wanted to be – someone’.