Language, Individual & Society, Volume 19, 2025

Abstract: Kamila Shamsie’s works reflect her sensitivity to and anxieties about the disunities in contemporary global context. While she focuses on the biased outlook on women in A God in Every Stone (2014), she deals with the imposition of religious doctrines on individuals at an early age and its adverse effects on their future lives in Burnt Shadows (2009). Shamsie elaborates on the ongoing biases against immigrants in the UK in Home Fire (2017). However, different from these works, Shamsie concentrates on the socio-economic, cultural and gender-based disunities in an intertwined way in her latest novel, Best of Friends (2022). In the work, the state repression against Zahra’s family, her family’s moderate economic status, her reaction against the British policies, in contrast to the well-to-do status of Maryam’s family, her family’s harmony with politics, Maryam’s basis of her life on integration, her rapid elevation in the British social context due to her negative approach to immigrants and support for the UK government transform and inevitably terminate the friendship between these two characters. Thus, Best of Friends invites reading for its problematisation of the inevitable and adverse effects of ongoing social, cultural and economic differences on friendship within the contemporary globalising world.