MY FRIENDS

455pp., paperback, Viking, London, 2024

ISBN: 9780241409497

Winner of the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction.

The novel follows the lives of three Libyan friends living as exiles in London, from the 1980s to the 2011 Arab Spring. 

“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. It 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 towards a different type 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.” Maaza Mengiste, author of The Shadow King

"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." Juan Gabriel Vàsquez, author of The Sound of Things Falling

Hisham Matar was born in New York City to Libyan parents, grew up in Tripoli and Cairo, and has lived most of his life in London. His memoir The Return won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize, the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and the Rathbones Folio Prize, amongst others. Matar is also the author of the novels In the Country of Men and Anatomy of a Disappearance, and the non-fiction work A Month in Siena. He is 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.