Best of Friends: A Novel

Labyrinth Books will welcome Kamila Shamsie and Michael Wood to discuss Shamsie’s latest novel.

Zahra and Maryam have been best friends since childhood in Karachi, even though—or maybe because—they are unlike in nearly every way. Yet they never speak of the differences in their backgrounds or their values, not even after the fateful night when a moment of adolescent impulse upends their plans for the future. Three decades later, Zahra and Maryam have grown into powerful women who have each cut a distinctive path through London. But when two troubling figures from their past resurface, they must finally confront their bedrock differences—and find out whether their friendship can survive.

Thought-provoking, compassionate, and full of unexpected turns, Best of Friends offers a riveting take on an age-old question: Does principle or loyalty make for the better friend?

Kamila Shamsie is the award-winning author of Home Fire; In the City by the Sea, Salt and Saffron, Kartography, Broken Verses, and Burnt Shadows. She teaches creative writing at Hamilton College. Michael Wood is professor emeritus of English and Comparative Literature at Princeton University. He has written widely on 20th century literature, film, and literary theory and is an admired cultural critic who writes regularly for the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books. He is the author of seminal books on Nabokov, Marquez, Yeats, Oracles, and much more.

This event is cosponsored by Princeton University’s English Department