Critic Reviews
Great
Based on 14 reviews on
"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 - FINALIST FOR 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.
"Matar’s profoundly moving and unsettling novel... haunted my year. He writes of exile, of friendships woven from “great affection and loyalty” but also “absence and suspicion”, and you walk with him through a London filled with the whispers of writers’ ghosts, memories and betrayal."
"Mr. Matar weighs these complexities with tremendous sensitivity, and “My Friends” is not only indispensable for a full understanding of Libyan émigrés but is, more generally, a great novel of exile."
"The unfussy tone never exploits the historical events and real places that the narrative incorporates…while Khaled’s…Benghazi has become synonymous…with political events, it feels like an act of love to reverse time and bring it back to life as a homeland and place of belonging."
"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, author of The Emperor's Children
"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 Tóibín, New York Times bestselling author of The Magician
"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, author of The Sound of Things Falling
"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