rowing up in Karachi in the ‘90s was, mildly put, surreal. Everything was bright and fast and loud and exciting and you never knew if you’d have school the next day or if MQM might be protesting yet another indignity by burning stuff on the roads or those transport guys would jaam all the pahiyas in the city. You had no way of knowing if the summer rain beating down on your 4th-storey window to Clifton Bridge would take down all the electric cables, or if you might have a working fan for another day. Life in Karachi was unpredictable. It was terrifying. It mirrored perfectly, the perfect storm raging inside the children who weren’t quite children anymore.

In Kamila Shamsie, those children, still occasionally raising their hands to politely ask a question while they adult through relationships and marriages and careers and friends, find someone who gets it.

Shamsie is a great writer, a wonderful storyteller, but her greatest gift is in being completely unabashed about bringing her experiences, observations, and emotions together in someone else’s story.

She herself may have never found herself being threatened by some idiot on Napier Road, but she definitely can build the stress, the guilt, the sense of culpability even when it wasn’t your fault into a compelling chapter. She can also put all those feelings into a neat little phrase: “girl fear”.

The well-timed Best of Friends explores the very end of a very one-of-its-kind era and the beginning of an entirely new experience for Pakistan with the appointment of a woman Prime Minister. Maryam and Zahra find themselves at once the closest to each other and slightly alienated as they grow up during this time, united by their history, the universal experience of young adulthood, but divided in the things they couldn’t tell each other: the private impulses that drive them, the individual circumstances that draw a fine line between them.

The well-timed Best of Friends explores the very end of a very one-of-its-kind era and the beginning of an entirely new experience for Pakistan with the appointment of a woman Prime Minister. Maryam and Zahra find themselves at once the closest to each other and slightly alienated as they grow up during this time, united by their history, the universal experience of young adulthood, but divided in the things they couldn’t tell each other: the private impulses that drive them, the individual circumstances that draw a fine line between them.

As the two grow up and find themselves in another country, still bound together by the love and kinship they grew up with, but with perhaps the incredulity we all have felt towards the choices, lifestyles, and politics of our old friends.

Then of course, the sweetness of this quiet aspect of friendship between women, which though Shamsie isn’t at all overt about, seeps into every word of the story. You could be a woman anywhere in the world and understand the fierceness and loyalty with which women love each other. We do things that aren’t asked of us, but we know the other needs, or simply show up in our own way, day after day after day.

While all great works of literature and art will offer something that allows their audience to recognize themselves in, English language writers of Pakistani origin are almost a necessity at this juncture in time. We are a bilingual nation, with a culture that contains multitudes, but have often been forced to look elsewhere for representation of, at the very least, a culture that slightly resembles ours.

In Shamsie, we find someone who can speak eloquently to what being Pakistani means, in Pakistan and outside of, and the subtle ways in which our external circumstances have shaped each one of us.