Nina Stibbe's Favourite Books About Friendship
By Viking Books UK
Nina Stibbe's Favourite Books About Friendship
By Viking Books UK
Nina Stibbe is the author of two works of non-fiction and three previous novels, including Reasons to Be Cheerful, which is the only novel to have won both the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction and the Comedy Women in Print Award.
One Day I Shall Astonish the World is published in hardback by Viking on 21 April 2022. To celebrate its upcoming release, Nina has chosen some of her favourite books about friendship.
Relationships can be the lifeblood of fiction, but some of my favourite books feature a friendship at their heart, rather than the more usual romantic or familial interaction. I am not talking about the saintly, loyal type, where one of the friends might gracefully die, surrounded by lilies and leave behind orphaned infant children, nor the sort where one of the friends is a psychopath, intent on seducing the other’s husband or slipping sugar into their tea—I prefer good old fashioned friendship, in which decent but gritty lopsided pals rough and tumble a bit and the natural friction provides the kind of dilemma with which we can all identify.
Authors from Nancy Mitford to Anna Sewell prove that friendship is more than capable of providing energetic twists and turns. Here is a selection of books with friendship centre-stage.
Country Girl: 'There's no-one like Edna O'Brien' (Anne Enright)
EDNA O'BRIEN
£12.99 £12.34I read this at a young age and was hooked by the somewhat tumultuous relationship between Cait Brady and Baba Brennan. On the face of it Baba is a bit of a bitch and not the sort of friend sweet Cait deserves, but in the story, as in life, they get along fine and in tolerating occasional letdowns Cait is rewarded with the side of Baba’s personality that brings adventure and fun, and leads to the a special and glorious rite of passage; dyeing their pastel-coloured underwear sophisticated black.
My Brilliant Friend
Elena Ferrante
£9.99 £9.49The first of the ‘Neapolitan Novels’ that span an epic sixty years of friendship, growth, turmoil and change between Lenu and best friend, Lila Cerullo. The two are unequal and different in personality from the start and it is this mismatch that provides much of the energy in the novel. For instance, an academic rivalry between the two concludes with Lenu’s father throwing her through a glass window.
The Pursuit of Love: Now a major series on BBC and Prime Video directed by Emily Mortimer and starring Lily James and Andrew Sco
Nancy Mitford
£8.99 £8.54I count this among my favourite novels. Mostly I love the friendship at the heart of it between Linda Radlett—the jewel in the eccentric Radlett family—and Fanny Logan (the narrator) cousin and Linda's best friend and confidente. The two young women are strikingly different, Linda is passionate while Fanny is reserved and sensible, and though the relationship is unequal and uneven, the girls bring each other the sort of joy and adventure not possible with a friend cut from the same cloth.
Jane And Prudence
Barbara Pym
£14.99Jane, a provincial vicar's wife, lives a very different kind of life to her single, independent friend Prudence, who lives in London and is in love with her married employer, the head of an unspecified academic organisation. Jane encounters a dashing widower, and decides he will make an excellent husband for Prudence whose life, Jane decides, needs some stability, by which she means a husband. Much of the joy in this book is the perceptions each friend has of the other’s life.
Mapp and Lucia
E F Benson
£8.99 £8.54Part of the divine 'Mapp and Lucia' series, focusing on idle women in the 1920s and their struggle for social dominance over their small communities. Benson invented the titular characters separately but when he brought pretentious, domineering Emmeline Lucas ('Lucia') and the scheming, manipulative and ineffectively malign Miss Mapp together in this fourth book, the series really came into its own.
Notes on a Scandal
Zoe Heller
£9.99 £9.49When Sheba begins an affair with a pupil at school you might think her friendship with colleague and confidante Barbara will be her salvation. The older, solitary Barbara offers disgraced Sheba not only mercy and kindness and a shoulder to cry on, but eventually moves into the home where Sheba now lives alone, soothing her and shielding her from prying eyes. But Barbara’s motives are muddled to say the least and their friendship takes a sinister turn.
Never Let Me Go
Kazuo Ishiguro
£9.99 £9.49Kath, is free-spirited, kind, and just, while her friend Ruth is opinionated, extrovert, and ruthlessly sociable. The pair are good friends, but at Hailsham, a boarding school, compassion, betrayals, snubs and affection can get twisted and intensified. The brilliance of Ishiguro’s alternative reality ‘cloning’ novel is the realistic portrayal of intimate adolescent female bonds. With no family to dilute them, students’ friendship is paramount, and the narrator’s recall is forensic.
Black Beauty
Anna Sewell
£14.99 £14.24I remember being captivated by a horse narrating his own story, and even more fascinated by the relationship with stablemate, Ginger, which gets off to a bumpy start. Beauty is gentle, willing, and eager to please, Ginger is quick-tempered, critical and easily irritated. Despite, or perhaps because of, their differences, this blossoming friendship is the heart and soul of the book.