BEST OF FRIENDS, by Kamila Shamsie (Bloomsbury, $32.99)
It could be said that women writers are as fascinated by women’s friendships as they are by romantic relationships. Canadian novelist Carol Shields once stated that friendships are lost in modern novels written by men; that “the modernist tradition has set the individual, the conflicted self, up against the world”. Kamila Shamsie, writing some 20 years later, makes friendship her central subject.
is Shamsie’s eighth novel. Her seventh, the, which won the 2018 UK Women’s Prize for Fiction, centred on the same topic. In that case, it was a dangerous friendship between two men that involved recruitment into Isis and tragic fallout for their families and the people who loved them.
