My Friends

Hisham Matar is the author of The Return, which won the Pulitzer Prize for memoir in 2017. My Friends, his 2024 novel, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and was also longlisted for the Booker Prize and awarded the Windham-Campbell Prize. It follows Khaled, a Libyan student in Edinburgh who travels to London in 1984 to attend a protest against the Qaddafi regime, only to watch the demonstration turn violent. Injured, unable to leave Britain, and unable to tell his parents in Libya what he has witnessed, Khaled begins a decades-long life in exile that the novel traces with patience and precision.

The novel is centrally about friendship: the particular bonds that form between people displaced from their countries of origin, who must build something like home out of shared language, shared memory, and shared loss. Matar writes about these bonds without sentimentality, tracking the ways time and political circumstance test them. The Arab Spring arrives midway through the novel and forces Khaled into a confrontation with what exile has cost him and what it has, unexpectedly, given him.

At 416 pages, My Friends is the longest book in this group, but faculty in postcolonial literature, diaspora studies, and contemporary fiction have found it unusually rich. Matar's sentences are careful and unhurried, and the novel asks serious questions about political obligation, identity, and the ethics of survival. Published by Random House.