4.0
My Friends
ByPublisher Description
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 • WINNER OF 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.
“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 • WINNER OF 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.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesMy Friends Reviews
4.0
“MY FRIENDS is a novel that spans most of Khaled’s lifetime, centred around friendship and exile, and the way anchoring friendships between people of similar origin and political leanings may be a mini-homeland of its own. It traces the ups and downs of the relationships between the three friends and others in their lives, both back in Libya and their host country while they are in their state of exile. It explores the range of ways in which exiles respond or adapt to their inability to return home out of fear, because of the invasive reach of a suffocating regime. Khaled, unlike Mostafa and Hosam, is not a very hopeful person—over the years, he adapts to England, almost letting go of his hopes for return and to see his family again; fear is a second skin for him, the stability of being largely out of reach of a dictator after his brush with death, a state from which he doesn’t seem willing to shift. In contrast, his two friends are more proactive, reaching a point where they can no longer wait out the death of a dictator, but participate in the fight to make it happen.
The three friends keep each other close, but while Khaled acquiesces to his state of exile and rootlessness, Hosam and Mostafa take part in the movements in history. They are driven by a more active sense of hope, one that drives them to take up arms, to ride the waves of the Arab Spring to see their motherland freed, to end the dictator’s regime once and for all. Despite themselves having been displaced for most of their lives, the geographical distance is a barrier that Hosam and Mostafa are willing to traverse, never mind the toll that being actively involved in war and violence may have on them. Khaled, in contrast, observes them from a distance and records their stories.
There’s a nostalgic poignance the voice of the older Khaled as he recounts his childhood in Libya, and then his move to England and all the years in between. As he retraces his steps in London, the city becomes a space to unspool the threads of his life and relationships, particularly with Hosam and Mostafa: cafe is the cafe in its present state and the cafe the three of them used to meet up in, a street in London is just a street in London and it is also the street where he and Mostafa were shot, a flat is a regular flat or its where he was once neighbours with his friend. Similarly, Libya is the Libya of the novel’s present, or it is the homeland he yearns but could not return to because he could put himself and his family in danger, it is a site of conflict and his home has been destroyed so he can’t return to that same roof.
I loved the writing of his novel, and particularly Khaled’s ruminations on friendship and unrootedness, that runs through the chapters. And while I’m from a very different country myself, I couldn’t help but draw parallels between the state of exile and its accompanying hopelessness that Khaled and his friends have to grapple with, and mine over the state of oppressive chaos that my own motherland has been in for the past five years and counting. Can I, like Khaled, passively hope for a chain reaction that will free the nation, in hopes that other, braver people can take up the mantle? And what about the accompanying guilt for being safely out of reach for the time being?”
BelievableChange and growDiverse representationLikeableMemorableMultilayeredStrong relationshipsClever plottingEpic scopeNonlinear narrativeSatisfying conclusionSlow start, strong finishSteady pacingWell-structuredAtmosphericBeautifulEvocative imageryHistoricalNostalgicPicturesqueRealisticSetting fits the storyVivid descriptionsBeautifully-writtenDescriptiveEasy to readOriginalDeathGriefMurderRacismWar violence
About Hisham Matar
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.
Other books by Hisham Matar
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