My Friends

‘The first Booker contender of 2024... a deeply touching, beautifully composed book’ Sunday Times

‘My Friends is a brilliant novel about innocence and experience, about friendship, family and exile. It makes clear, once more, that Hisham Matar is a supremely talented novelist’ - Colm Toibin, author of Brooklyn

‘Hisham is one of our greatest writers, how lucky we are to be in his midst’ - Maaza Mengiste, author of The Shadow King, shortlisted for the Booker Prize

My Friends is the most beautiful, complete, masterful novel I have read in a long time. Read it' - Priscilla Morris, author of the Women's Prize shortlisted Black Butterflies

Khaled and Mustafa meet at university in Edinburgh: two Libyan eighteen-year-olds expecting to return home after their studies. In a moment of recklessness and courage, they travel to London to join a demonstration in front of the Libyan embassy. When government officials open fire on protestors in broad daylight, both friends are wounded, and their lives forever changed.

Over the years that follow, Khaled, Mustafa and their friend Hosam, a writer, are bound together by their shared history. If friendship is a space to inhabit, theirs becomes small and inhospitable when a revolution in Libya forces them to choose between the lives they have created in London and the lives they left behind.

‘Poignant and quietly suspenseful... Readers encountering Matar for the first time will find in “My Friends” a masterly literary meditation on his lifelong themes’ – New York Times

‘An unforgettable novel -- wise, urgent and profound -- from one of our era's great writers’ - Claire Messud, author of The Emperor’s Children

‘Meditative yet propulsive’ Mail on Sunday

My Friends is quite possibly Hisham Matar’s best work yet, and that’s saying something. A quiet detonation of a novel, this masterful inquiry into the nature of friendship, exile and place is not so much to be read as lived through. The depth of thought, the unflinchingly honest confrontation with loss and longing, is there on every page, in every moment. Very few writers alive can converse with negative space the way Matar does, and My Friends is stunning, beautiful proof.’ Omar El Akkad, author of American War and What Strange Paradise

‘A profound celebration of the sustaining power of friendship, of the ways we mold ourselves against the indentations of those few people whom fate presses against us’ – Washington Post