8 Great Friendship Books for your TBR list
It feels like friendship books have really come into their own. More and more often, friends are celebrated as the great loves of our life and the ones that really shape us over the longest periods of time.
From childhood kindred spirits to coming-of-age epics, to those adult friendships that you discover in the most unlikely of places, here are our top picks for your tbr…
The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
Afghanistan, 1975: Twelve-year-old Amir is desperate to win the local kite-fighting tournament and his loyal friend Hassan promises to help him. But neither of the boys can foresee what will happen to Hassan that afternoon, an event that is to shatter their lives. After the Russians invade and the family is forced to flee to America, Amir realises that one day he must return to Afghanistan under Taliban rule to find the one thing that his new world cannot grant him: redemption.
A gripping and emotionally devastating account of betrayal and redemption amidst the turbulence of Afghanistan, Hosseini’s novel is a masterful classic. It's a story of exile, ambition and betrayal that stayed with us long after the final page.
Friends Like These - Meg Rosoff
New York City. June, 1982. When eighteen-year-old Beth arrives in Manhattan for a prestigious journalism internship, everything feels brand new - and not always in a good way. A cockroach-infested sublet and a disaffected roommate are the least of her worries, and she soon finds herself caught up with her fellow interns - preppy Oliver, ruthless Dan and ridiculously cool, beautiful, wild Edie. Soon, Beth and Edie are best friends - the sort of heady, all-consuming best-friendship that's impossible to resist. But with the mercury rising and deceit mounting up, betrayal lies just around the corner. Who needs enemies ... when you have friends like these?
Dive into the friendship of Beth and Edie; Friends Like These is an alluring coming-of-age tale about the summer that changes everything. This is a gritty, intoxicating novel about a summer of unforgettable firsts: of independence, lies, love and the inevitable loss of innocence.
Girl, Woman, Other - Bernadine Evaristo
From Newcastle to Cornwall, from the birth of the twentieth century to the teens of the twenty-first, Girl, Woman, Other follows a cast of twelve characters on their personal journeys through this country and the last hundred years. They're each looking for something - a shared past, an unexpected future, a place to call home, somewhere to fit in, a lover, a missed mother, a lost father, even just a touch of hope . . .
Joyfully polyphonic and vibrantly contemporary, this is a gloriously new kind of history and a choral love song to black women. Evaristo’s prose hums with originality and life, with stories of identity, race, womanhood, and the realities of modern Britain.
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow - Gabrielle Zevin
Two kids meet in a hospital gaming room in 1987. The days and months are long there. Their love of video games becomes a shared world - of joy, escape and fierce competition. When the pair spot each other eight years later in a crowded train station, they are catapulted back to that moment. The spark is immediate, and together they get to work on what they love - making games to delight, challenge and immerse players, finding an intimacy in digital worlds that eludes them in their real lives.
This is the story of the perfect worlds Sadie and Sam build, the imperfect world they live in, and of everything that comes after success: Money. Fame. Duplicity. Tragedy.
This is friendship in all its messy and complicated glory; not a romance, but it is about love. Friendship and rivalry, fame and creativity, betrayal and tragedy, perfect worlds and imperfect ones. And, ultimately, our need to connect: to be loved and to love.
A Little Life - Hanya Yanagihara
When four graduates from a small Massachusetts college move to New York to make their way, they're broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition. Over the decades, their relationships deepen and darken, tinged by addiction, success, and pride. Yet their greatest challenge, each comes to realize, is their friend Jude himself, by midlife a terrifyingly talented litigator yet an increasingly broken man, his mind and body scarred by an unspeakable childhood, and haunted by what he fears is a degree of trauma that he'll not only be unable to overcome - but that will define his life forever.
An immensely powerful and heartbreaking novel of brotherly love and the limits of human endurance, A Little Life descends into a dark and involving tale of toxic relationships and the vicious scars of childhood.
Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine - Gail Honeyman
Eleanor Oliphant has learned how to survive - but not how to live. She leads a simple life. She wears the same clothes to work every day, eats the same meal deal for lunch every day and buys the same two bottles of vodka to drink every weekend. Eleanor Oliphant is happy. Nothing is missing from her carefully timetabled life. Except, sometimes, everything.
One simple act of kindness is about to shatter the walls Eleanor has built around herself. Now she must learn how to navigate the world that everyone else seems to take for granted - while searching for the courage to face the dark corners she's avoided all her life.
Funny and perceptive, this is an endearing novel about how one simple act of kindness can change everything. Honeyman’s narrative is full of quiet warmth and deep and unspoken sadness, Eleanor's world will feel familiar to you from the very first page.
My Brilliant Friend - Elena Ferrante
The story of Elena and Lila begins in the 1950s in a poor but vibrant neighbourhood on the outskirts of Naples. Growing up on these tough streets the two girls learn to rely on each other ahead of anyone or anything else, as their friendship, beautifully and meticulously rendered, becomes a not always perfect shelter from hardship.
Ferrante has created a memorable portrait of two women, but My Brilliant Friend is also the story of a nation. A ravishing and generous-hearted novel about a friendship that lasts a lifetime.
Best of Friends - Kamila Shamsie
In 1988 Karachi, two fourteen-year-old girls are a decade into their friendship, sharing in-jokes, secrets and a love for George Michael. As Pakistan's dictatorship falls and a woman comes to power, the world suddenly seems full of possibilities. Elated by the change in the air, they make a snap decision at a party. That night, everything goes wrong, and the two girls are powerless to change the outcome.
In present-day London, they remain bound together by loyalties, disloyalties, and the memory of that night, which echoes through the present in unexpected ways. Their friendship has always felt unbreakable; can it be undone by one decision?
An epic story that explores the ties of childhood friendship. It is a characteristically insightful and compelling examination of identity, friendship and the contradictions of contemporary London as two Pakistani women confront the disturbing ghosts of their past.
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