‘A friendship stops being intense, but it doesn’t stop being strong’: Kamila Shamsie

Kamila Shamsie on her 8th novel 'Best of Friends' “A lot of fiction about migration focuses on difference but there is also this experience of arriving in a new place and finding things that are familiar,” British-Pakistani writer Kamila Shamsie, 49, tells me over a Zoom call from her home in London. Shamsie’s latest novel Best of Friends, her eighth, is about childhood friends we first meet as teenagers in Karachi under military dictatorship and then as women in their 40s in London, with public profiles. For me, the line that distils the essence of the book is by a minor character: “You can’t let politics get in the way of friendship.” Does Kamila Shamsie believe this? I do think something like Sex and the City is nice since it’s about four women who are friends, and for all the men in their lives, their friendship is a proper friendship. Right now, I’ve just been watching a TV series on Amazon Prime called A League of their Own and there’s a really beautiful friendship between these two women, Max and Clance.