Top 10 unlikely friendships in fiction

We get to choose our friends, so the saying goes; I’m interested in how and why we make those selections. Perhaps some people come together simply, happily, thanks to virtues all of their own. But there are other, more complicated reasons why we find ourselves next to those we do. Our companion may possess what we most want, or lack. Remind us of someone who came before, and offer the chance to make corrections or mete out punishment.

1. H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald Goshawks are not cuddly. Macdonald is utterly clear-eyed on both the bird’s reptilian qualities and what’s in it for her: to “possess the hawk’s eye … to live the safe and solitary life” after the shock of her father’s sudden death. Yet she writes a definitive account of the relationship between an animal and human. Her book is lucid and beautiful; there is so much heart in it, and though she refuses to anthropomorphise, I love the moment when she and the hawk play ball, Macdonald throwing “Mabel” pills of scrunched-up paper, which she catches in her beak – and tosses back.

2. The Turning by Tim Winton Vic writes of himself and Biggie Botson, and indeed there are shadings of Of Mice and Men throughout. The two set off on a road trip to escape smalltown Australian life and across just 14 pages of pinpoint prose, we witness male friendship in all its need and compromise and competition. “We’re idiots of a different species but we’re both bloody idiots,” Vic says, in one of the moments of deadpan awareness that spike the story. It closes: “In the hot northern dusk, the world suddenly gets big around us, so big we just give in and watch.” Magnificent and so, so sad.

3. Dear Thief by Samantha Harvey This novel is a letter from an unnamed woman to an absent friend, Nina, the beautiful, evasive, uncompromising Butterfly. She starts to write on a whim, troubled and full of questions, and their history together unfolds across the novel, looping around a central betrayal. The pair’s connection is complex and frayed, yet it has held across the years. A nuanced and elegant study.

4. The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst Nick Guest is an outsider on the inside in echoes of his namesake, Nick Carraway, the narrator of the The Great Gatsby. Just a few weeks into his stay in the Fedden family’s Notting Hill home, Guest “was able to think of himself … as a lost middle child”. He is permitted entry to the inner circle, but it comes with conditions; he must keep secrets, both the Feddens’ and his own – the truth of his sexuality. The cost of inclusion is a double life of hypocrisy and studiously averted eyes.

5. Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin

What a relief to discover that someone as naive, provincial and uncool as Mary Ann Singleton can find her place in such a racy, bohemian crowd. A midwestern secretary, she is the outsider when she arrives in San Francisco in 1976, but is welcomed warmly and without question. (Before she even meets Anna Madrigal, her landlady, she discovers a note stuck on her door: “… taped to the note was a neatly rolled joint.”) Best of all, she is excused a makeover. In a novel that champions acceptance, Mary Ann’s difference is as valid as any other.

6. The Woman upstairs by Claire Messud“How angry am I? You don’t want to know. Nobody wants to know about that,” opens Messud’s book, introducing us to Nora, single, 42 and tired of being good. She rewinds to tell us the story of her relationships with the Shahid family, each of them beautiful, brilliant and kind. We know from the outset that the ending won’t be pretty; the novel explores the ways in which both parties use each other, before landing on an unguessable twist.

7. The First Bad Man by Miranda JulyA “woman upstairs” of the Girls era. Cheryl is a delusional, hilarious narcissist, but also good-hearted and, against all logic, hopeful. When she lands Clee, her boss’s daughter, as a houseguest, they seem an impossible pair. Antagonism tips into violence (albeit consensual) and briefly, sex. It is a friendship of an unusual shape: “I’d been her enemy, then her mother, then her girlfriend,” Cheryl writes, though in the universe of this novel (in which no one conforms to conventional codes of behaviour), it cannot be denied.

8. Harry Potter by JK Rowling In a group, there are often individuals who, without the buffer of their cohort, wouldn’t really get along. At various points in the series, Harry Potter has to play mediator between Hermione “the brightest witch of her age” Granger and Ron Weasley, funny, cantankerous and dim. Turns out their bickering masks passion (spoiler alert!) as the two end up married.

9. The Accidental by Ali SmithAmber, “kind of a woman but more like a girl”, turns up one evening, uninvited, at the Smarts’ disappointing Norfolk holiday home. She stays, and over the course of a summer shakes them out of their middle-class stasis. Both a liar and truth-teller, she picks off each family member, uncovering their weaknesses and fears and starting them over again.

10. Gorilla by Anthony Browne

Hannah loves gorillas, but her dad doesn’t have time to take her to the zoo. On the night of her birthday, something amazing happens. What this is is drawn, not written; a huge, stern, incredibly lifelike gorilla appears at the end of her bed. She is frightened (so was I, when I first saw it), but he puts on her father’s coat (“a perfect fit”) and off they set. The representation of the gorilla says everything to me, of Hannah’s anger and frustration at her dad. As an adult he has all the power; he can simply withdraw from her. Say no. They dance at the end, the gorilla and the girl, and with his hat tipped, he could almost be her father. I find that scene heartbreaking and brave for a children’s book, but also very true.