You don’t have to read past the opening pages of Kamila Shamsie’s new novel to figure out the theme. Zahra, the daughter of a popular cricket broadcaster in 1980s Karachi, thinks that American movies seldom focus on female friendships, that these relationships often unfold as “a subplot to romance, never the heart of the story”. Shamsie, by contrast, is preoccupied with the platonic bond between Zahra and her classmate Maryam, the scion of a post-partition business family. We see them first as uncertain teenagers in Pakistan, hanging out after school in each other’s houses, chatting for hours about their furtive romances, their future lives. Thirty years later, the two of them are comfortably ensconced among the post-Brexit London elite. They go for long walks on Primrose Hill together on Sundays and hang out at each other’s plush apartments after work, still talking about the same things, really.
Shamsie portrays their bond as an alliance of opposites, but their individual backgrounds seem pretty adjacent. Maryam’s parents can afford to spend their summers shopping in London, while Zahra’s parents – her mother is a school principal – must turn up for their decently paying jobs in Karachi during her term breaks. The two girls attend the same expensive school, listen to the same music (George Michael, Tracy Chapman) and briefly fancy the same boy at 14. Later in life, Zahra becomes the leader of a well-known civil liberties group in the UK and is often photographed at events with Annie Lennox and while watching “cricket with Malala at Lord’s”.
