My Friends My Friends

My Friends

Booker Prize Longlisted 2024

    • 3.4 • 5 Ratings
    • £5.99

Publisher Description

LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2024
FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD 2024

WINNER OF THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL FICTION
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

GENRE
Fiction & Literature
RELEASED
2024
11 January
LANGUAGE
EN
English
LENGTH
464
Pages
PUBLISHER
Penguin Books Ltd
SIZE
1.4
MB

Customer Reviews

Schoenelfenbeinlein ,

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.

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