Last Thursday, Hamilton welcomed alumni author Kamila Shamsie ’94 for a reading of her new novel

Best of Friends

. The reading was followed with a Q&A and book signing, and many faculty and students were in attendance to hear Shamsie read several passages from her newest book. Shamsie is an alumnus of the College having earned her BA in creative writing nearly 20 years ago, and has come back several times to give readings of her work. In this particular event, Shamsie seemed eager to give listeners a closer look into the pillars of the novel and what her writing process looked like.

Kamila Shamsie is best known for her award-winning book

Home Fire

in 2017 as a reimagining of the classic Greek play

Antigone

in the world of the British Muslim experience and terrorism. She has authored nine books and spends most of her time in London.

Shamsie’s newest novel,

Best of Friends,

takes place in the final days of a dictatorship in Pakistan in the late ’80s as we follow the lives and friendship of two young girls, Maryam and Zahra, who are both a part of the wealthy class despite different circumstances and statuses. The novel follows their friendship as young schoolgirls in Karachi to their adulthood in modern day London where they have both relocated. Shamsie’s reading revealed several themes within the book, including the changing nature of their friendship based on their differing ideologies of their purpose in the world, how they as women are treated in their home country versus their chosen country, and how politics makes its way into characters’ lives without permission. The chapters drift in between Maryam and Zahra’s experiences and are written in the third person point of view. Shamsie emphasized that the impetus of the novel was to explore the intensity of adolescent friendships through the eyes of young girls. She later elaborated that she wanted to capture the feeling that no one else is as important in the world as one’s childhood best friend and that the complete and total dedication to them is one that lessens with time as people grow older and doesn’t always return with adult friendships. Friendship was the most keenly explored in the passages she read for the audience on Thursday, jumping around in the first few chapters and offering a window into the characters of Zahra and Maryam.

After the reading, Shamsie answered questions from the audience, ranging from the presence of the sport cricket in her book and its colonial history in South Asia, to what parts of her characters are and aren’t a part of her, to what her writing process looks like as a whole and from novel to novel. Shamsie said that most of her characters are amalgams of herself and the people she knew growing up in Karachi before moving to London as an adult, and that they all escape from her during the writing process: sitting down at a desk every morning after coffee and writing for at least three hours, followed by six or seven drafts before it is a publishable novel. A new novel was also briefly hinted at after an audience member asked her if she was writing anything new, to which she responded, “A document of 538 words of which I might delete soon.” Shamsie also shared some advice for the young writers in the crowd, saying that their goal should always be to get to the end of a story before beginning the editing process or reworking it, asserting that one can always go back.

At the end of the Q&A, Shamsie reflected on how the landscape of the internet has completely changed her writing and research process, saying it has opened up avenues in the blink of an eye that would never have previously been available not only to her but to other, young writers as well. Claiming it should be seen as a positive tool for the propagation of written art in the world, Shamsie expressed hope for the medium in the future and that it should not be abused by A.I. to overtake authentic work from human writers. Followed by enthusiastic applause and an interactive book signing, Shamsie was again asked to come back for another reading in the future to a raucous response.