My Friends

Critics Review

• The first Booker contender of 2024… a deeply touching, beautifully composed book

  Sunday Times

• 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.

  Colm Toibin

• I have always admired Matar’s tender and compassionate but equally strong and compelling voice

  Elif Shafak

• 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.

  Claire Messud

• 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 towards a different kind of return. One that leads us back to ourselves. Hisham is one of our greatest writers, how lucky we are to be in his midst.

  Maaza Mengiste, author of THE SHADOW KING, shortlisted for the Booker Prize

• ‘I could not love this book more. Reflective, compelling, deeply tender at times, there are surprising shifts and turns and moments of utter brilliance where new understanding blooms. A walk across London from King’s Cross Station to Shepherd’s Bush gives rise to memories of a life diverted by a moment of political action. About friendship, exile, belonging, lives lived and not lived, and Libya’s recent past, London emerges as a place of refuge, a transitory half-home even after three decades, a stepping stone. As soon as I finished, I started again beguiled by Matar’s long, sinuous sentences and enlivened by my new knowledge of what it was all about, my heart moving in my chest. My Friends is the most beautiful, complete, masterful novel I have read in a long time. Read it.’

  Priscilla Morris, author of the Women's Prize shortlisted BLACK BUTTERFLIES

• Tender, precise, and incredibly moving, MY FRIENDS is a rare novel, holding so much of the human heart that it is at times unbearably real. It’s impossible to read this book without feeling a renewed connection to the world and all its intricate sorrow and love.

  Sean Hewitt, author of ALL DOWN DARKNESS WIDE

• Poignant and quietly suspenseful… Readers encountering Matar for the first time will find in “My Friends” a masterly literary meditation on his lifelong themes. For those who already know his work, the effect is amplified tenfold.

  New York Times

• Meditative yet propulsive – as well as structurally inventive – the narrative puts us in Khaled’s mind as he walks across his adopted city while reflecting on youth, exile and the flashpoints of Libya’s recent history

  Anthony Cummins

• This novel is equally (as The Return) delicate, intellectually and emotionally, and equally bold in its formal arrangement…the book is artfully paced. Long, mellifluous, meditative sentences are punctuated by short ones of bell-like clarity…this is a book about exile and violence and grief, but it is above all – as the title tells us – a study in friendship

  Guardian

• 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.

  Omar El Akkad, author of AMERICAN WAR and WHAT STRANGE PARADISE

• 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 Vásquez

• In January, we kick things off with My Friends (Viking) by Hisham Matar, a powerful story of friendship and loss. Khaled and Mustafa are wounded by government agents during a protest at the Libyan embassy in London. The pair find themselves torn between the comforts of their life in the UK and the horrors of a civil war at home

  Observer

• I loved this sweeping yet intimate, powerful yet subtle tale of Libyan exiles in London and the way politics shapes lives.

  The Bookseller