Shamsie

Kamila Shamsie’s latest novel chronicles the friendship of two women from their early teens through to middle age. Zahra is the daughter of a sports journalist and Maryam is due to inherit her father’s luxury leather goods business. We first meet them when they are 14-year-olds in 1980s Karachi hanging out at each other’s houses and obsessing over school cliques, boys and their love of Jackie Collins novels and George Michael. Humming in the background is the new political dawn represented by Benazir Bhutto after the…

The Plague Jacqueline Rose Life, death and politics Sigmund Freud thought that an awareness of death gave life a special value. According to the renowned cultural critic Jacqueline Rose, the sudden death in 1920 of Freud’s favourite daughter Sophie Halberstadt-Freud resulted in his “philosophy of grief”, one that stems not just from his inner realm but also from the external political world. At the time,…

My earliest reading memoryAn illustrated version of Ian Fleming’s Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. I was probably three or so, in Karachi, and according to my parents I couldn’t yet read but had learned the book by heart so knew when to tell them to turn the page. I have a clear memory of looking at words on the page beneath the illustration of a flying car.My favourite book growing upThe Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by CS Lewis. I was in a room full of adults, bored, when I first noticed this book with an appealing title on…

A lot of research went into your last few books. Was that the case for Best of Friends too?It had less research than the previous three novels. The section set in 1988 in Karachi was based on my experience, but there were gaps in my memory. So I would go on Twitter and ask, “Karachi people, give me the names of video shops in the 1980s.” While the first section required little research as I had lived through it and it was about two girls in school, for the latter, I had to figure out what venture capitalists do. I knew…

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…

Literary genres age, much as people do. Postcolonial literature – PoCo to friends – was once an angry young outsider leading the charge against empire. Now, much older and having made some money, PoCo seems to have compromised with the world, depicting chic, transnational lives jetting between humid capital cities and the glamorous locales of New York and London. Invariably educated at Oxbridge and the Ivy League, the characters pursue comfortable careers in politics, the media and, almost always, high finance. After a…

Last year, while I was working on a late draft of my novel Best of Friends, a story broke about a club known as the advisory board. It was organised by the former Conservative party co-chair Ben Elliot, and made up, at least in part, of donors paying £250,000 to the Tory party. It was an odd thing to read about, given that I had invented for the novel a club called the High Table for political donors who paid £200,000 to the party of government – I’d wondered if I was setting too high an entrance fee. I’m not claiming any…