My Friends (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780812994841)

A "masterly" (The New York Times, Editors' Choice), "riveting" (The Atlantic) novel of friendship, family, and the unthinkable realities of exile, from the Booker Prize-nominated and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Return

"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 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.

Author: Hisham Matar
ISBN-10: 0812994841
ISBN-13: 9780812994841
Publisher: Random House
Language: English
Published: 01/09/2024
Pages: 416
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.40lbs
Size: 9.30h x 6.30w x 1.50d

Review Citation(s):
Library Journal Prepub Alert 08/01/2023 pg. 4
Publishers Weekly 11/13/2023
Library Journal 12/01/2023 pg. 86
Booklist 12/01/2023 pg. 100
BookPage 01/01/2024
Kirkus Reviews 01/15/2024
Shelf Awareness 01/12/2024