My Friends
Booker Prize Longlisted 2024
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4.0 • 11 Ratings
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
WINNER OF THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL FICTION
NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER FOR FICTION
WINNER OF THE GORDON BOWKER VOLCANO PRIZE 2025
FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD 2024
LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2024
FROM THE PULITZER-PRIZE WINNING AUTHOR OF THE RETURN
'A brilliant novel about innocence and experience, about friendship, family and exile' COLM TOIBIN
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.
'The first Booker contender of 2024 . . . a deeply touching, beautifully composed book' Sunday Times
'It is impossible to describe the profound depth and beauty of this book' MAAZA MENGISTE, author of THE SHADOW KING
'My Friends is both a complex and unsentimental meditation on what friendship means and a searingly moving exploration of how exile impacts those who are forced to live in this state of loss. It is a book that we loved for its spareness of language and its deeply affecting storytelling.’ Booker Prize Judges 2024
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Pulitzer winner Matar (for The Return, a memoir) presents a poised and poignant story of a Libyan dissident exiled in the United Kingdom during the Qaddafi era. In 1983, 17-year-old Khaled leaves Benghazi to study literature in Edinburgh, where he meets excitable Mustafa. While attending an anti-Qaddafi protest in London they are both shot by pro-Libyan gunmen. They survive, and Khaled cuts himself off from his family so as not to endanger them back home. In 1995, Khaled cements a friendship with dissident writer Hosam Zowa, whose work has attracted the ire of the Qaddafi regime. The danger the three men face shapes their relationship, as Hosam initially suspects Khaled of being a secret agent for Qaddafi. Eventually, though, their solidarity and mutual love of literature contribute to a tight bond including Mustafa, which holds strong even after Hosam and Mustafa return to Libya in 2011 to join the Arab Spring uprising while Khaled stays behind in London. Khaled's elegiac ruminations never throttle the suspense as the characters continuously risk their lives for Libyan liberation. This is both a melancholic examination of the horrors of repression and a powerful ode to the freedom of speech.
Customer Reviews
Painful Friendships
Three friends in Exile from Libya share a span of time in London and become close.They have been traumatised by violence against them during their demonstration against the Ghaddafi regime at St James square, Khaled being the most wounded friend. He is the narrator, whose perspective we come to know best.
Much later, around the end of the dictators regime, the friend’s ways are parting although they stay in touch. Hosam, the writer,plays a particular role as the narrators alter ego.We learn a lot about their families in Libya.
It impressed me, how the friends were unable to truly live in the present of their new host country, as their thinking remained permanently fixed on their past, their primary family and “The Country”.The new relationships formed in England come across rather lifeless, sterile.The woman partners to the friends seem bland and exchangeable, the glimpses on the Professor supporter and the nurse a little nicer but unsubstantial.Slightly more visible is the city London itself, with its walkable locations, Cafes and restaurants.
There are a lot of beautiful passages, thoughts, images in the book and it is intense, driving the reader forward.The atmosphere is often sad and there is restlessness, the narrator being tossed between the past and the present.
I will have to read it again, although I suspect I will always prefer “The anatomy of a disappearance”, Matar’s earlier novel.