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My Friends

My Friends

Summary

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

Reviews

  • A deeply touching, beautifully composed book
    Sunday Times

About the author

Hisham Matar

Hisham Matar was born in New York to Libyan parents, spent his childhood in Tripoli and Cairo and has lived most of his life in London. His memoir The Return received a Pulitzer Prize in 2017. He is also the author of In the Country of Men, shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Anatomy of a Disappearance and A Month in Siena. His most recent novel, My Friends, won the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction 2024, was longlisted for the Booker Prize, and nominated for the National Book Award. His work has been translated into over thirty languages.
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