'The first Booker contender of 2024... a deeply touching, beautifully composed book' Sunday Times

An intensely moving novel about three friends living in political exile and the emotional homeland that deep friendships can provide - from the Booker-shortlisted, Pulitzer prize-winning author of THE RETURN

Khaled and Mustafa meet at university in Edinburgh: two Libyan eighteen-year-olds expecting to return home after their studies. In a moment of recklessness and courage, they travel to London to join a demonstration in front of the Libyan embassy. When government officials open fire on protestors in broad daylight, both friends are wounded, and their lives forever changed.

Over the years that follow, Khaled, Mustafa and their friend Hosam, a writer, are bound together by their shared history. If friendship is a space to inhabit, theirs becomes small and inhospitable when a revolution in Libya forces them to choose between the lives they have created in London and the lives they left behind.

'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


'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. Hisham is one of our greatest writers, how lucky we are to be in his midst.' MAAZA MENGISTE, author of THE SHADOW KING

"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

"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

"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

"Dazzling...a personal, deeply felt work...tightly structured and controlled, looping back and forth through time and memory, building on itself in a process of gradual expansion and revelation" - Toronto Star

"Matar weighs... 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" - Wall Street Journal

"Exploring identity, family, friendship and exile in a strange land, Matar has produced a work of emotional depth" - Radio Times

"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

"Riveting and humane... At the core of My Friends is a powerful juxtaposition of loneliness and camaraderie, self-reliance and dependence, which defines the outline of exile... [Matar] shows us with masterful command how life happens at the intersection of the personal and political, what we can control and what we cannot." - Atlantic

"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" - Washington Post

"A vivid, finely crafted story about home and exile, family and friendship, loss and rebirth. The old adage that fiction is truer than fact comes to mind... an engaging, symphonic novel of overlapping lives and loyalties'" - Irish Times

"A moving study of friendship and the effects on a person of living in exile" - The Gloss

"Part historical fiction, part cultural reflection, this is a story about the way exile calcifies the heart into an organ of brittle longing... 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" - Washington Post

"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

"What a pleasure and relief that one of the first novels of the new year should be such a success - and in the face of very high expectations" - Financial Times

"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

"Matar writes beautifully . . . He is a nuanced observer with a gift for conveying both absurdity and raw emotion" - Guardian on In the Country of Men

"Matar is beginning to do for the Arab experience what the likes of Salman Rushdie have done for the sub-continent" - The Times

"Beautifully written . . . a graceful guide through Libya's recent history " - Barack Obama on The Return

"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