Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Timbid Aramis, filling in for Andrew Limbong.

A good friendship can transform your life. That's certainly been the case for me, and it was especially true when I was in college.

There's this intense intimacy that comes from living in close quarters with your favorite people,

you know, figuring out classes and parties and crossing that threshold into adulthood.

But what happens when you graduate?

Life takes over and the nature of that life-altering friendship changes.

Strange Girls by Sarvat Hassin takes on this topic. She spoke about it with

all things considered host, Juana Summers. Many of us have had that one friendship, you know,

the one where you get really close, really fast, and then the real world gets in the way. The

friendship falters. And suddenly, it has been a decade since you've even talked.

In author Sarvatt Haseen's new book, Strange Girls,

protagonists Ava and Alia are those friends to each other.

Both of them are just sort of defined almost by their similarities as much of their differences.

So they're both bookworms and they're both obsessed with novels and writing and storytelling and are very creatively ambitious and want to be

part of that world. Eva is American, Alia is Pakistani. They meet in college in London and

quickly declare themselves strange girls. When I talked with author Sarvat Haasin about the book,

I started by asking her about that phrase and what it means to them.

They're 18 when they sort of define themselves as strange girls. And I think they feel like

they can't see the models for womanhood. They've been fed an idea of femininity and what their life should be like when

they grow up and it doesn't really resonate, so they feel sort of strange and disconnected from it.

I think they're also just very, you know, as any two young aspiring writers, quite pretentious

and determined to set themselves apart from the rest of the world. I don't think what they want

...