Five books about breaking up with your friend

Sarvat Hasin is a novelist and dramaturg from Pakistan. She has a masters in creative writing from the University of Oxford. Her first novel, This Wide Night, was published by Penguin Random House India and longlisted for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. Her second book, You Can’t Go Home Again, was published in 2018 and featured in Vogue India's and The Hindu's best of the year lists. Her third novel, The Giant Dark, was a runaway critical success, won the Mo Siewcharran Prize, and was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature Encore Award. Strange Girls is her US debut. She lives in London.

At Lit Hub Hasin tagged "five novels [that] are a kind of canon for the friendship breakup," including:

Maeve Binchy, Circle of Friends

As the title might suggest, Binchy’s sprawling novel tells the story of a group. Drawn together on the first day of college when they witness an accident together, the young Dubliners begin a journey of being in and out of each other’s lives (and in and out of love). The big friendship break up occurs between Benny and Nan when it transpires that Nan has been sleeping with the former’s boyfriend. What Binchy does so well here is draw out each of these characters’ internal lives and motivations. There’s no heroes or villains in this story. There is skill also in her depiction of the collective: when something ruptures between two people can reverberate through a whole friendship group.

Read about another title on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue