My Friends

‘I wrote the opening paragraph and carried it in my head for a decade before I sat down to write the book. During that time I felt it work on me: the narrator’s voice, the logic of his sentences, and his abiding passion for his friends. I gradually understood that the book was also a walk – a mapping of an exile, a city and a state of mind – that it was both thematically as well as metaphysically about friendship, its prose and syntax growing more familiar as it progressed, so that reading it would resemble a growing intimacy.’  

Read the full interview here.

‘Two young Libyan students meet at university in Edinburgh and make a decision to join the protests outside the Libyan embassy in London. Both are wounded when they are fired on. This powerful story of exile charts the aftermath of this moment as the friends navigate a world where they cannot rest, where both the idea and the reality of homeland is contingent and dangerous. My Friends is both a complex and unsentimental meditation on what friendship means and a searingly moving exploration of how exile impacts those who are forced to live in this state of loss. It is a book that we loved for its spareness of language and its deeply affecting storytelling.’

Lucy Hughes-Hallett, The Guardian

‘This is a book about exile and violence and grief, but it is above all – as the title tells us – a study in friendship. Khaled loves his two friends, although he doesn’t always like them. He observes their rivalries. He is hurt when they exclude him. He is often self-deluded, but the frankness with which he thinks, as he walks and remembers, about what they have meant to him, gives this quietly spoken book a slow-growing but impressive force.’

John Burnside, Literary Review

‘It is this careful observation of intimacy amid the trials of, first, a terrifying dictatorship and, later, a bloody revolution that marks My Friends as a masterpiece of historical narrative to set alongside, say, Doctor Zhivago or Lampedusa’s The Leopard. But what lingers most after Khaled’s tale is done is the vital and moving depiction of conviviality that he gradually pieces together, like an intricate philosophical jigsaw puzzle, on the night-long walk through London that informs his narrative.’

Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal

‘Amid this refined climate of melancholy acceptance arrives the unexpected revolutionary fervor of the Arab Spring of the early 2010s, whose tensions and excitements My Friends captures as well as any novel I have read […] 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.’

James Wood, The New Yorker

‘[Matar] has written that absence is not empty but ‘a busy place, vocal and insistent.’ His work speaks eloquently of this loud absence and its unstopped complexities … Matar’s most touching and provoking creation: out of time, but of our time.’

John M. Clum, New York Journal of Books

‘As always, Matar’s writing is elegant and metaphorically rich, filled with carefully drawn portraits of Khaled and his intelligent, highly articulate friends and dramatic renderings of their intense conversations. Above all, there is the force of powerful emotions: outrage, grief, love. My Friends is a major literary accomplishment.’