The best novels about friendship and all its complexities
Books that do a fantastic job of exploring the pure love and tensions that can be found in friendships across all ages
There’s no manual for navigating friendships. When you’re younger, friends are a result of close proximity. As you transition into adulthood, making new ones and maintaining those you have is a whole other undertaking.
Over my lifetime, I’ve had friendships that have naturally fizzled, ended with a bang, and transformed into some of the most sustaining relationships I have. What strikes me is how little we talk about this messy middle, at least in mainstream culture. As amazing as friendships are, they can be the source of unbearable emotions. There is no heartbreak like growing apart from someone who was once central to your life.
I’ve selected five novels that do a fantastic job of exploring the pure love and complexities that can be found in friendships across all ages.
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
Amir and Hassan are best friends. They spend their childhood playing games and roaming the streets of their Kabul neighbourhood. Yet the vast social divide between them — with Amir being a wealthy Pashtun boy, son of a respected businessman, and Hassan, a Hazara (a historically persecuted minority in Afghanistan) and son of Amir’s father’s servant — is something Amir is never able to shake. Others around him won’t let him either.
When Hassan is brutally assaulted by a gang of older boys in an alleyway, Amir watches in horror and does nothing, changing the course of both their lives forever.
The Kite Runner was Hosseini’s debut, published in 2003, and became an instant classic, offering an intimate portrayal of Afghanistan during a time the west saw it only through the lens of war. He takes the reader through Kabul before the Soviet invasion in 1979, the chaos of displacement, eventual refuge in 1980s America, and back into the Taliban’s brutal first takeover of Afghanistan.
What I loved the most about The Kite Runner was how often the plot caught me off guard. Each revelation reframed what I thought I understood about the characters. It’s a beautiful novel exploring themes of friendship, betrayal and redemption.
Expectation by Anna Hope
Expectation is one of my favourite novels about the dynamics of female friendships, purely because it is set in a world so familiar to me. In 2004, three friends live together in their gorgeous three-story townhouse in east London. Their lives seem perfect. These late-20s women spend their free time buying organic food at outdoor markets, attending gallery openings, and eating pide and drinking beer at their local Turkish restaurant.
This bliss, of course, does not last. Much of the novel takes place several years later. Their lives pull them in different directions, and with that comes envy and the weight of unmet expectations.
Best of Friends by Kamila Shamsie
Pakistani-British novelist Kamila Shamsie’s most recent book, published in 2022, is another story that tackles the tensions of childhood friendship and how people drift apart as life takes them on divergent journeys.
Maryam and Zahra from Karachi are an unlikely pairing, one is popular and wealthy, the other a goody-two-shoes from a modest background. An incident one night leaves the girls admonished by their school and families. As a result, Maryam is packed off to boarding school in England, leaving Zahra behind.
The novel skips forward a few decades and traces how the two end up living in London as adults, and how they have maintained their friendship through years of politically contradictory values. The tension lies in questioning how long this can last.
Shamsie brilliantly weighs up the costs of lifelong friendship against the obvious benefits, asking the reader how much of themselves they’d be willing to give up for someone they’ve known their whole life.
There Are More Things by Yara Rodrigues Fowler
Melissa and Catarina, roommates with Brazilian roots, live in an ex-council flat in London. They meet in 2016, ahead of the Brexit referendum and during a moment that feels particularly regressive in global politics.
The friendship between them is the engine of this novel, which is ultimately about sisterhood and revolutionary love. As the story unfolds, their lives prove far more intertwined than we first imagine.
The narrative moves across continents and generations, reaching back to Brazil’s military dictatorship in the 1970s to link the political struggles of then with the activism of now. Rodrigues Fowler frames this as a continuation of a fight that has been going on for generations — one that their own family histories are entangled in.
There Are More Things, published in 2022, is about political hope in a depressing political moment, but also about two young women in London trying to find their place in the world and make it better.
Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line by Deepa Anappara
In India, a child goes missing every eight minutes. Many of those who vanish are trafficked. This was the starting point for journalist Deepa Anappara’s punchy first novel, Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line, published in 2020, which tells the story of such disappearances through the eyes of the children.
The book is predominantly narrated by Jai, a nine-year-old who lives with his parents and sister inside a single room in an unnamed basti (slum). Inside this room, however, is what Jai describes as the “best thing” his family owns — a TV that shows his favourite programme, Police Patrol.
When his Muslim classmate, Bahadur, goes missing, the local police seem indifferent. Jai, inspired by the cop show he watches religiously, enlists his friends to find Bahadur.
Anappara handles heavy material with unexpected lightness, letting Jai’s voice carry the reader through societal issues, such as poverty, corruption and Islamophobia, present in contemporary Indian society. At its heart, this novel explores innocent childhood friendship in a world that is anything but.
