What role do friendships play in our lives—setting us on new paths, grounding us, dissolving and reappearing at critical moments—and how do they shape the stories of who we are? In her “haunting fable of friendship”, The Book of Goose, Yiyun Li “brings insight and depth to a tale of two French girls spreading their wings” (The Guardian). Kamila Shamsie’s Best of Friends is “an admirably thorny novel of postcolonial adolescence and contemporary politics…[that charts] a friendship from girlhood to middle age” (The Guardian). In Sayaka Murata’s short story collection, Life Ceremony, strange and wonderful stories of family and friendship ask what it means to be an individual in our world. In these recent works, the bonds of friendship—both in their presence and absence—take center stage and span decades and continents, acting as artistic and spiritual catalysts. Moderating the conversation is novelist Mona Awad, whose novel Bunny takes a dark and satiric look at friendship.
