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A Novel
by Hisham Matar
Book Reviewed by:A luminous novel of friendship, family, and the unthinkable realities of exile, from the Booker Prize–nominated and Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Return
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.
1
It is, of course, impossible to be certain of what is contained in anyone's chest, least of all one's own or those we know well, perhaps especially those we know best, but, as I stand here on the upper level of King's Cross Station, from where I can monitor my old friend Hosam Zowa walking across the concourse, I feel I am seeing right into him, perceiving him more accurately than ever before, as though all along, during the two decades that we have known one another, our friendship has been a study and now, ironically, just after we have bid one another farewell, his portrait is finally coming into view. And perhaps this is the natural way of things, that when a friendship comes to an inexplicable end or wanes or simply dissolves into nothing, the change we experience at that moment seems inevitable, a destiny that was all along approaching, like someone walking toward us from a great distance, recognizable only when it is too late to turn away. No one has ever been a nearer neighbor...
What are you reading this week? (5/15/2025)
I should wrap up The Busybody Book Club today, and then it's on to my review book, My Friends (the one by Fredrik Backman, author of A Man Called Ove, not the one by Hisham Matar). After that it'll probably be The Ghostwriter. In audiobook format, I'm finishing up James (and totally loving it). N...
-kim.kovacs
What are you reading this week? (5/8/2025)
...My Friends by Fredrick Backman, author of https://www.bookbrowse.com/reviews/index.cfm/book_number/3090/a-man-called-ove A Man Called Ove . ( Not the My Friends by Hisham Matar, although I'd like to read that one too, at some point.) In audiobook format, I should finish up Huckleberry Finn in the next couple of days, then I...
-kim.kovacs
What are you reading this week? (04/10/2025)
"My Friends" by Hisham Matar. I was 8 when the Qaddafi stuff happened so I am learning a lot about Libya. I read "The Return," nonfiction by the same author and a lot of the themes are similar.
-Anthony_Conty
National Book Awards
Last night the National Book Award for Fiction went to Percival Everett for his novel, https://www.bookbrowse.com/reviews/index.cfm/book_number/4796/james James . What do you think of the decision? Below is this year's longlist; which have you read, and what did you think of the book? Pemi Aguda,...
-kim.kovacs
Khaled begins to tell his life story, irrevocably marked by his presence at the 1984 shooting of anti-Qaddafi protesters from the Libyan embassy in London, where as a young man studying literature abroad he was wounded and possibly put on the regime's radar, making it unsafe for him to return to his homeland for the foreseeable future. The trauma he has experienced seems to separate him from conventional life, leaving him to lose himself in books and to foster meaningful but flexible connections outside the framework of marriage or traditional family. Matar's novel is a quietly humming beast, a low-flying glide over a specific cross-section of contemporary history, but also a bittersweet exploration of how it feels to have vital, formative experiences of friendship, and then to outgrow one's friends or to be outgrown by them in moments that are likewise defining...continued
Full Review
(871 words)
(Reviewed by Elisabeth Cook).
Claire Messud, author of The Emperor's Children
Hisham Matar's My Friends recounts an exile's life shattered by violence, yet sustained, fiercely if complicatedly, by friendship. An unforgettable novel—wise, urgent, and profound—from one of our era's great writers. Colm Tóibín, New York Times bestselling author of The Magician
My Friends is a brilliant novel about innocence and experience, about friendship, family, and exile. It makes clear, once more, that Hisham Matar is a supremely talented novelist. Juan Gabriel Vásquez, author of The Sound of Things Falling
My Friends is Matar's most political novel, but also an intimate meditation on friendship and love and everything in between. It is deeply affecting, generous and wise, and all these virtues come in writing of extraordinary elegance, with one of those voices that you want to listen to for the rest of your life. Maaza Mengiste, author of The Shadow King, shortlisted for the Booker Prize
It is impossible to describe the profound depth and beauty of this book. My Friends is a breathtaking novel, every page a miracle and an affirmation. If there is a language of exile, My Friends is what it sounds like: exquisite and painful, compassionate and unflinching, and, above all, overwhelming in its boundless hope that within exile rests a path toward a different kind of return—one that leads us back to ourselves. Hisham Matar is one of our greatest writers. How lucky we are to be in his midst. Omar El Akkad, author of American War
My Friends is quite possibly Hisham Matar's best work yet, and that's saying something. A quiet detonation of a novel, this masterful inquiry into the nature of friendship, exile and place is not so much to be read as lived through. The depth of thought, the unflinchingly honest confrontation with loss and longing, is there on every page, in every moment. Very few writers alive can converse with negative space the way Matar does, and My Friends is stunning, beautiful proof.
In My Friends by Hisham Matar, the classical Arabic poem The Epistle of Forgiveness (Risalat al-Ghufran) by the Syrian writer Abu al-Ala al-Ma'arri makes multiple appearances. Main character Khaled refers to his copy of the work, given to him by his father when he left Libya for university in Scotland, as "the most precious object I possessed." Later, when applying to study literature at a different college in England, Khaled is asked whether he recognizes a passage read aloud. When he can't place the text, the interviewers tell him it's from Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, and express surprise that he hasn't read it. When they ask what he has read, he mentions Seneca, Jean Rhys, and Hosam Zowa (a Libyan writer existing in the world of ...
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