My Friends

Description

My Friends
by Hisham Matar

ISBN: 9780812985092
Softcover, new

Publication Date 01/07/2025

 

Brief Description:
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE • A
“masterly” (The New York Times, Editors’ Choice), “riveting” (The Atlantic)
novel of friendship, family, and the unthinkable realities of exile, from
the 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 OF THE WASHINGTON POST AND PUBLISHER WEEKLY’S TEN BEST
BOOKS OF THE YEAR • A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, Time, NPR,
BookPage WINNER OF THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL FICTION • 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.