My Friends

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST - LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE - A "masterly" (The New York Times, Editors' Choice), "riveting" (The Atlantic) novel of friendship, family, and the unthinkable realities of exile, from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Return

"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."--The Washington Post

ONE OF THE WASHINGTON POST AND PUBLISHER WEEKLY'S TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR - A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, The Boston Globe, Time, NPR, BookPage

WINNER OF THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL FICTION - FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD - LONGLISTED FOR THE ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE IN FICTION

One evening, as a young boy growing up in Benghazi, Khaled hears a bizarre short story read aloud on the radio, about a man being eaten alive by a cat, and has the sense that his life has been changed forever. Obsessed by the power of those words--and by their enigmatic author, Hosam Zowa--Khaled eventually embarks on a journey that will take him far from home, to pursue a life of the mind at the University of Edinburgh.

There, thrust into an open society that is miles away from the world he knew in Libya, Khaled begins to change. He attends a protest against the Qaddafi regime in London, only to watch it explode into tragedy. In a flash, Khaled finds himself injured, clinging to life, unable to leave Britain, much less return to the country of his birth. To even tell his mother and father back home what he has done, on tapped phone lines, would expose them to danger.

When a chance encounter in a hotel brings Khaled face-to-face with Hosam Zowa, the author of the fateful short story, he is subsumed into the deepest friendship of his life. It is a friendship that not only sustains him but eventually forces him, as the Arab Spring erupts, to confront agonizing tensions between revolution and safety, family and exile, and how to define his own sense of self against those closest to him.

A devastating meditation on friendship and family, and the ways in which time tests--and frays--those bonds, My Friends is an achingly beautiful work of literature by an author working at the peak of his powers.

Author: Hisham Matar
Publisher: Random House
Published: 01/09/2024
Pages: 416
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.40lbs
Size: 9.30h x 6.30w x 1.50d
ISBN: 9780812994841

Review Citation(s):
Library Journal Prepub Alert 08/01/2023 pg. 4
Publishers Weekly 11/13/2023
Library Journal 12/01/2023 pg. 86
Booklist 12/01/2023 pg. 100
BookPage 01/01/2024
Kirkus Reviews 01/15/2024
Shelf Awareness 01/12/2024

About the Author
Hisham Matar was born in New York City to Libyan parents, spent his childhood in Tripoli and Cairo, and has lived most of his life in London. His memoir The Return was the recipient of many awards, including the 2017 Pulitzer Prize, the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and the Rathbones Folio Prize. It was also shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize, the Costa Biography Award, and a National Book Critics Circle Award. Matar is also the author of the novels In the Country of Men, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and Anatomy of a Disappearance. His most recent book is A Month in Siena. Matar is a professor at Barnard College and Columbia University, and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an honorary fellow of the Royal Academy of Arts. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages.