Best of Friends by Kamila Shamsie

This is the story about a life long friendship between Zahra, the daughter of a popular cricket broadcaster in 1980s Karachi, and her classmate Maryam, the child of a post-partition business family. We meet them first as young teenagers in Pakistan, hanging out after school in each other’s houses, chatting for hours about their current romances and their future lives. Thirty years later, the two of them are comfortably ensconced among the post-Brexit London elite. They go for long walks on Primrose Hill together on Sundays and hang out at each other’s plush apartments after work, still talking about the same things. On the one hand, they could have been broken apart. Maryam is a startup investor, part of a shadowy cabal of capitalists who trade favors with the same government that Zahra and her organization is determined to hold to account. But they chare something in their past that they are eager to not have surface, and then it does. There are a number of twists and turns, with subplots that in the end out pace the plot, and it is a good story well told.