15 Books About Friendship: Envy, Drift and the Ones That Last

Sam and Sadie meet as children in a hospital games room, lose touch, then find each other again as students and start building games together. What follows is three decades of collaboration: the studio, the success, the credit that gets shared unevenly, the silences that last for years at a stretch. Zevin writes the work as convincingly as the feelings, which is rarer than it sounds, and the games become the language these two use when they cannot manage plain speech. If you have ever built something with a friend and watched the building change the friendship, this reads like being caught.

Elena and Lila grow up in a cramped, violent Naples neighbourhood in the 1950s, both clever, both ambitious, and only one of them is allowed to stay in school while the other is pulled out to work in her father's shop. Everything that follows grows out of that split. Ferrante writes envy with a precision I have not found anywhere else, not the cartoon kind but the sort that lives alongside real love, where you want your friend to do well and cannot quite bear it when she does. This is the first of four novels, and the quartet is worth committing to.

Nel and Sula grow up together in a hill town called the Bottom. One settles into marriage and respectability, the other leaves and comes back as something the town treats as a scandal, and Morrison writes their childhood so well that the adult betrayal, when it lands, feels like it is happening to you rather than to a character in a book. The sentences are doing more work per line than any other prose on this list. Underneath the friendship there is a second story about what a community needs an outcast for.

Amir and Hassan grow up in the same house in 1970s Kabul, one the son of a wealthy man and the other the son of his servant, and the class line runs through everything they do together, including the kite flying they both love. Something happens in an alley that Amir sees and does not stop, and the rest of the novel is the long bill for that silence, running through the Soviet invasion, exile in California and a return to a country under the Taliban. It is a heavy read and a fast one, which is an unusual combination.

Jude, Willem, JB and Malcolm meet at college and stay together into middle age, and although all four get chapters, the book belongs to Jude, whose past is revealed slowly and is worse than you are braced for. What Yanagihara does better than almost anyone is the texture of long friendship: the shared flats, the ritual dinners, the friend who becomes family because the family did not show up. What she also does is put the reader through an enormous amount of suffering, at length, with very little relief offered along the way.

Richard arrives at a Vermont college, talks his way into a Greek class of five students, and is slowly absorbed into a group that treats itself as an aristocracy of the mind. You are told in the first pages that they killed one of their own, so this is not a mystery about who did it. It is a slow account of how a closed friendship buries something and what the burying costs each of them afterwards. Tartt is very good on the intoxication of being chosen by a group, which is the real subject of the novel.

Kathy narrates her childhood at Hailsham, a boarding school where the pupils are looked after, watched, and told they are special, and slowly you work out what the school is for. I will not go past what the first fifty pages give you. The friendship is what the novel is actually about: Ruth's manipulations, Kathy's patience, the way three people arrange themselves so that two are close and one is being managed. It is quiet and restrained and it hurts more the further away from it you get.

Swaminathan is a schoolboy in the invented South Indian town of Malgudi: cricket matches organised with grand ambition, a new friend from a richer family, a teacher who terrifies him, a nationalist protest he half understands and joins anyway. Narayan writes children without making them cute, so Swami is petty, loyal, cowardly and generous inside the same afternoon. Not much happens by the standards of modern fiction, and it is still the most accurate thing on this list about how friendship feels at ten, when losing one friend is the end of the world.

Hari, Ryan and Alok share a room at IIT Delhi, all of them near the bottom of the class, and the book is about what a brutal grading system does to three ordinary boys and to the friendship holding them upright. Bhagat gets hostel life right: the pooled money, the borrowed notes, the terrible plan that sounds reasonable at 2 am, the friend whose family expectations are heavier than yours and who cannot say so. The prose is plain, the humour is broad, and the last third takes academic pressure seriously.

Alderton writes her twenties as a run of terrible flats, worse dates, spectacular hangovers and one constant, her friendship with Farly. The dating stories are funny and forgettable. The friendship material is why the book lasted, because she is very good on the specific grief of a friend pairing off, on the recalibration nobody prepares you for, and on what happens when the person who was your default plan acquires a different default. Between chapters there are recipes and spoof emails that are hit and miss, and the honesty, when it arrives, is the real thing.

Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman make a podcast together and were, by their own account, everybody's model friendship until the whole thing quietly cracked. The book alternates their story with research and interviews, and the useful part is the vocabulary it gives you: the stretch a friendship goes through over distance and time, Shine Theory, which is their term for boosting your friends instead of competing with them, and the plain fact that nobody teaches us to maintain a friendship the way couples get taught to maintain a marriage. They also write about race and class inside the friendship, which most books like this avoid.

They name themselves the Interestings at fifteen, promising each other a life of art, and Wolitzer then follows them for forty years while one couple becomes very rich and the others do not. The engine of the book is envy that never gets said out loud, and the slow work of staying friends with somebody whose life has become much easier than yours. She is excellent on how money changes the small mechanics of a friendship: who pays, who travels to whom, whose apartment everyone gathers in, and which jokes quietly stop being funny.

Frances and Bobbi perform poetry together in Dublin, used to date, and now live in that unlabelled space between best friend and ex. When they meet an older couple, Frances starts an affair with the husband, and the novel is usually described as being about that affair. It is not. The actual subject is everything Frances cannot say to Bobbi, and the way two clever people use irony to avoid one honest sentence for months at a time. Rooney writes dialogue that sounds like a group chat and lands like an X-ray.

Jess is a farm kid who wants to be the fastest runner in fifth grade, and Leslie is the new girl whose parents are writers and who beats him without meaning anything by it. They build an imaginary kingdom across a creek and rule it together, and for a while the book is simply about the relief of finding the one person your age who is not boring. Then it becomes something else entirely. Paterson wrote it after a real loss, and she never once talks down to a child about death.

Beartown is a failing town in the Swedish forest with one asset left, a junior ice hockey team that might reach a national semi-final. Backman spends half the novel building the bonds that hold the place together, between teammates, fathers, daughters and the two girls at the centre of it, and then a violent event splits every one of those bonds along the same line: what your friend is owed against what you know to be true. It reads fast, occasionally too fast, and the small town politics are exact.