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“... to know what we all think of Wordsworth’s “Daffodils”?’ Maryam mumbles into her desk in Kamila Shamsie’s eighth novel, Best of Friends. ‘Off with their sprightly heads!’ It’s Karachi in the summer of 1988. Maryam Khan and Zahra Ali are fourteen. They go to the same private school, but Maryam is the big name: attractive, imperious and ...”

“... as the second coming of Theodore Dreiser. ‘Waldman’s prose is almost always pitch-perfect,’ Kamila Shamsie wrote in the Guardian. ‘Waldman’s fearless dissection of the commodity of public sorrow is to be applauded, along with the brilliance of her writing,’ Catherine Taylor wrote in the Telegraph. In the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani ...”

“... of this present lot: Nadeem Aslam, Mohsin Hamid, Mohammed Hanif, Moni Mohsin, Daniyal Mueenuddin, Kamila Shamsie? The answer – given the multilingualism of South Asia, its histories and enmities, its experiences of modernity and colonisation – has to be a complex one. The riches and idiosyncrasies of Urdu writing must be one antecedent, as an ...”

“... pressure will determine the fate of mortal remains. In her tightly coiled new novel, Home Fire, Kamila Shamsie reimagines Antigone in relation to jihadism today.† If Creon had any support in the past, her dramatic reworking convinces us that, even in these extreme circumstances, twitter storms could fall upon him from every side; the call of the ...”

“... the ‘smoothly global’, untranslatable felicities over windy width – and Elena Ferrante over Kamila Shamsie? In the end, a case was being made for well-written, vital, challenging literature, full of sharp local particularities, wherever it turns up in the world; and so there was inevitably something a bit random about the writers chosen for the ...”