Gentle but insistent ... If you’re worried that a novel about the longevity of childhood friendship sounds sentimental, don’t be. Tangled up with Maryam and Zahra’s relationship are questions of responsibility, justice, power and ethics ... It’s the deep-rooted and complicated bond between the two women that keeps us turning the pages ... Alive and kicking beneath the surface. Simmering gently.

At the novel’s midpoint we jump forward three decades to London in 2019. Here it becomes clear that Best of Friends is not quite a novel but more like two novellas, the first energetic and the second bland. Going from the Karachi half to the London half is like exiting an idiosyncratic local restaurant and entering a Starbucks. There’s an anonymous sleekness — almost a C.G.I.-enhanced quality — to the second section ... It begins with a pair of articles: a profile of Zahra in The Guardian and one of Maryam in Yahoo! Finance. It is an awkward device for inserting 30 years’ worth of exposition ... The elements that intensified the friendship of Elena and Lila — their rivalry, crises, lopsided distribution of gifts — are present in Best of Friends but desaturated. So is the context. Ferrante conveyed a milieu as electrically as she did a relationship. Shamsie gets close in her evocations of 1980s Karachi, but the featureless depiction of London saps the novel of structure. The drama between Zahra and Maryam plays out as if against a green screen. Without a palpable sense of where we are and when, the characters — and everything they do, the whats and whys — take on the quality of anecdotes ... Shamsie’s previous novel Home Fire was a retelling of Antigone, and readers who loved that book (as I did) might consider approaching Best of Friends with subdued expectations. There are plenty of sentences to cherish...Even without the scaffolding of a Greek tragedy, there is a version of this novel that could have worked. The lives of Zahra and Maryam don’t intrinsically lack conflict. There is plenty of fiction about people who enjoy material comforts while suffering from psychological or spiritual torments. The problem is that these two are never convincingly tormented; only hassled, and their responses are proportionately bloodless.

A covert Künstlerroman – a novel about the maturing of an artistic consciousness – hiding inside what poses as yet another Bildungsroman ... The latter part of the novel, where Zahra and Maryam are high-powered women in contemporary London, seems a misjudged appendage to the engrossing earlier narrative, a lapse into smooth globalism ... Towards the end, in the novel’s only formal experiment, newspaper interviews with the two women are presented ... It’s when Shamsie...craft[s] the vivid facts of her life into fiction, that Best of Friends is at its admirably thorniest.

Shamsie returns to her winning formula, using her characters’ personal histories as a way to discuss broader political concerns. This is not subtly done, nor does it need to be when the fiction is as believable and captivating as Best of Friends ... The pace of the Karachi narrative is expertly done, loaded with present tense scenes that contain short flashbacks of seminal moments in the girls’ friendship. There are teenage awakenings aplenty, the shock of new desires, liaisons, physical changes. As with classic romance storylines...the joy for the reader is in the dual perspectives, shifting power dynamics and the question of how it all will end ... If the climactic scene in Best of Friends comes too close to the end of the book, and is followed by an epilogue of sorts that seeks to estrange rather than offer resolution, readers will forgive Shamsie this decision because the vast majority of her narrative is so compelling.

[An] unexpected and compelling weaving of the febrile past into her protagonists’ present ... Nevertheless, there are disappointments ... There is something bloodless and unconvincing about her protagonists in adult life ... Equally, what new wisdoms this novel reveals about the warp and weft of long-standing friendships isn’t entirely clear ... The ending of the novel frustrates, too: while a lack of resolution isn’t itself objectionable, the abruptness of the conclusion undoes some of the more careful, sustained earlier plotting ... Shamsie at her best? Maybe not this time.

For much of the novel, the relative absence of strife only underlines the fact that theirs is more a companionship of equals ... Shamsie adroitly captures the self-consciousness of girls at 14, how they come to terms with the inevitability of their changing bodies, how the starkness of their approaching adulthood is something they see reflected in the eyes of men leering shamelessly in public ... And yet you can’t help feeling that Best of Friends is an evasive novel, where the characters sometimes spout performative inanities .... The years when their lives might have radically diverged are dispensed with in neat backstories ... The reader, however, is never quite privy to these intimate chats. Shamsie seems more interested in describing their Sunday walks, or the decor of their London flats, or having a younger Maryam complain about the security arrangements in her parents’ gated Karachi mansion. As Virginia Woolf pointed out in her 1924 essay Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown, just because a novelist has imagined a house, it doesn’t always follow that 'there must be a person living there'. The view out of a character’s apartment window, the geography of her neighbourhood, can tell you only so much about the drama of her life ... I found myself wishing that Shamsie, too, would adopt the reader as a friend and trust us sometimes to get her point ... The writing can veer into adspeak ... Much like a protective parent, Shamsie goes out of her way to make sure her characters are spared any lasting consequences of their actions ... Shamsie doesn’t seem to realise what Zahra grasps at 14: a subplot is often more compelling than the main story.

Shamsie has the chance to write her most intimate story yet and trace a broad sweep of social change. She succeeds with the former, even if the latter becomes increasingly frustrating ... This first section elegantly captures the strength and pain of being young. Shamsie excels at the paradoxes of desire, of being able to see right through someone and still be drawn to them, and the 'strange new awfulness' of a maturing body. Karachi’s bazaars, beaches and cricket pitches simmer with possibility and the girls’ respective father figures are subtly turned ... The skulking threat of male power, so potent in the opening chapters, is neutered by the characters’ staggering success, and an influx of state-of-the-nation themes does little to supplement the lost tension. There are still reptilian men to contend with, but time and distance have reduced them to a bad smell ... The friends have a galvanic final confrontation — Shamsie knows how to write a climax — but it hinges on one character’s resentment that she 'lost everything', when it is hard to see how either woman could have achieved more than she did ... despite the disappointments of the second half, those quiet early scenes of teenage affection vindicate a smaller scope and do justice to the joy of friendship.

The Pakistan-set half of Shamsie’s narrative is by far the more effective. In poetic prose, Shamsie details the small ways friends imprint themselves on each other: the secrets shared, the mutual pop-star crushes, the books passed between them, how a best friend can become a fixture in a family home. In Pakistan, the girls are hemmed in by a surveillance society in which confidences cannot be shared over tapped phones ... From the very start of the second half, the narrative feels forced. It opens with a jarring gimmick: back-to-back media profiles of the two friends, published in 2019, 30 years later and half a world away from their schoolgirl days in Karachi ... Power corrupts, we already know, but what effect does it have on two women who have promised to trust each other no matter what? Where does the principle of loyalty stand in relation to every other principle in our lives? Where should it stand? These are profound questions, but Shamsie’s answers feel too schematic, if only in contrast to the rich and deeply personal tone of the first part. There are, to be sure, powerful moments in which we can see how little a person changes — or rather how much a person’s youth has determined her course — even when removed to another part of the world, a system that seems (at least on the surface) to work differently ... It’s to Shamsie’s credit that, by the end, we know the systems aren’t any more different than the people running them. Yet it still feels that we have learned this at the expense of the characters. Maryam and Zahra are revealed merely to be two distinct archetypes of the 'good immigrant' who are set on a crash course. At a time when soundbites and tweets have become our principal ways of communicating, Shamsie, a brilliant novelist and a subtle writer, felt a need to shout. Rather than letting us hear the echoes of a girlhood and another country in her grown characters, she loses faith in her readers to sense their vibrations.

Shamsie’s writing is intelligent, morally engaged, alive to cultural nuance and contemporary concerns. It just doesn’t sound very good ... The childhood scenes are examples of some of Shamsie’s finest writing. The author grew up in Karachi, and vividly conjures up the felt experience of the city and of early adolescence. Throughout the novel she is clear-eyed on friendship – on how close intimacy can run to hate. But in the second section the two women, with their matching differences, come to feel like illustrative examples. The schema is too clear, and too crude in comparison to recent, superior novels that explore how childhood friendships play out in adulthood ... Without the scaffolding (the alibi, perhaps) of Antigone, Shamsie struggles, once again, with the end stages of her plot, constructing an overextended, overelaborate domino run that needs one too many nudges to reach its conclusion ... To me, turning off your ears seems tantamount to going to an art exhibition wearing sunglasses. But perhaps, if you can read for content alone, this novel will strike you as better than second-rate – a lively debate piece addressing some of the key issues of our day.

The best thing about Kamila Shamsie’s eighth novel, Best of Friends, is the story isn’t hinged on a friendship gnarled with sexual, bodily, or intellectual envy. The conflict is more nuanced, primarily marred by a class difference, but more implicitly by the contradictions that exist within a life-long friendship ... Shamsie uses this strife between class and desire as a catalyst in the development of her characters...This portion of the novel is excellent. Zahra and Maryam are juggling family drama, school, the changes in their adolescent bodies, aspirations, and male attention ... This is where the problem with the novel starts. The plot fast-forwards to 2019 when Zahra and Maryam are in their forties, living independent and ambitious lives in London. Every now and then, in the midst of an unrelated conversation, one of them mentions Jimmy. This seems forced, as if Shamsie is not confident in the connections she’s making in her story and that she must signal to the reader to remember what happened that night and to hold on to it until the chilling moments of confrontation that take place at the end. Shamsie could be granted leeway. Perhaps she wants to show that trauma works like a leaky faucet: it drips and deposits mold on the surface before it finally bursts ... But Shamsie’s portrayal of the episode with Jimmy isn’t convincing enough to make it believable that Maryam and Zara are still clutching on to it after three decades. Even though the scene is thrilling, the fear palpable, the stakes heightened—it’s never to the point where we comprehend it to be the ultimate wound ... The second half of the novel is also rushed. Shamsie doesn’t pause to leisurely explore connections or illustrate characters in deft strokes. Instead, she tries to tie in political issues to their motivations, leaving us with a distracting plot and a weak narrative arc. When the novel ends, you can’t help but wonder how Maryam and Zara sustained their friendship for as long as they did in spite of deep-seated resentment. Shamsie answers this in the very first pages...Yet this subtext flounders at the first instance of conflict and the subtleties Shamsie effortlessly creates in the first half of Best of Friends dissolve like Zahra and Maryam’s friendship.

Shamsie is an adept chronicler of how politics impact families in both England and Pakistan ... Shamsie excels at balancing the personal and the political, and she artfully reconstructs the tense political environment of 1980s Pakistan and the rise of the surveillance state in 2019 London to provide ample opportunities for Maryam and Zahra to find themselves on opposite sides of such issues as privacy, privilege and refugee rights. For any reader who finds themselves at odds with an old friend, Best of Friends rings true in its honest, unvarnished portrayal of friendship strained by politics and ideology.

Nuanced ... Though the revelations aren’t that surprising, Shamsie is perceptive when it comes to picking apart the nuances of the women’s shifting dynamic. It’s not the author’s best, but it shows her to be a consistently thoughtful writer.

Th[e first] portion of the novel is sophisticated and poignant and crescendos to a pivotal scene in a car that is suspenseful, chilling, and masterfully executed. The second half fast-forwards to 2019, when the pair are living in London ... This portion of the novel is more scattered than the first. The maneuvering required for their powerful roles, while it allows Shamsie to touch on hot-button political issues, often lacks the exquisite nuance of her depiction of long-lasting friendship ... A quiet, moving portrait of two lifelong friends.