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.