BEST OF FRIENDS

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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 lensof two sharply drawn protagonists'' - Observer, Books of the Year 2022