Best of Friends
£8.99
Fourteen-year-old Maryam and Zahra have always been the best of friends, despite their different backgrounds. Maryam takes for granted that she will stay in Karachi and inherit the family business; while Zahra keeps her desires secret, and dreams of escaping abroad. This year, 1988, anything seems possible for the girls; and for Pakistan, emerging from the darkness of dictatorship into a bright future under another young woman, Benazir Bhutto. But a snap decision at a party celebrating the return of democracy brings the girls’ childhoods abruptly to an end. Its consequences will shape their futures in ways they cannot imagine.
‘A profound novel about friendship. I loved it to pieces’ MADELINE MILLER** SHORTLISTED FOR THE INDIE BOOK AWARDS 2023 ** PICKED AS ONE OF THE SUNDAY TIMES’ BEST PAPERBACKS OF 2023** CHOSEN AS A BOOK TO LOOK OUT FOR BY THE GUARDIAN, BBC, OBSERVER, DAILY MAIL, IRISH TIMES AND FINANCIAL TIMES **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?‘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 lens of two sharply drawn protagonists’ Observer
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