My Friends

Main character Khaled, originally from Benghazi, attends university in Edinburgh, where he meets Mustafa. Later, in London in 1984, he and Mustafa get involved in a demonstration against the Qaddafi regime outside the Libyan Embassy, which changes their lives forever. Hosam is a writer of a short story that Khaled had heard over the radio. They later meet and become friends. The narrative explores his friendship with fellow Libyans, Mustafa and Hosam, over the course of three decades. It also includes family, relationships, and the close bonds of the three friends with their home in Libya. At this time, the Qaddafi regime was tracking down and dealing harshly with any resistance.

This book combines beautiful writing, narrative arc, show more character, emotion, and socially relevant themes. The storyline covers the personal lives of the three friends and the events leading up to and including Arab Spring. The emotional heart of the story is the need for Khaled, as a teen, to forge an independent life apart from his family, while keeping the secret of the reason he cannot come home. I found it mesmerizing and read it straight through in one sitting. It is a wonderful blend of friendship, family, love, identity, exile, literature, and the downfall of a dictator. It will make my short list of best books of the year. I am adding it to my shelf of all-time favorites. show less

A beautifully written story of three Libyan friends, living in exile in London from the 1980s through to the Arab Spring and its aftermath. Khaled, Hosam and Mustafa are unable to return to home having criticized the government. The are also afraid to phone or write home as state surveillance is pervasive. They would risk their own lives, and those of family in Libya.

This book looks at the overwhelming weight of living with mistrust and doubt. As one character explains, "Freedom...is also the freedom not to be suspicious, not to fear, and not to envy." Through the three friends, we see how invasive and traumatic oppression is on the human mind and the human spirit.

Hisham Matar’s monumental third novel charts the path of Libyan Khaled Abd al Hady, from his youth in Benghazi to early middle age living as an exile in London. Khaled grows up in Libya under the repressive Qaddafi regime and knows what it’s like to live a life of careful compliance in a place where dissent is not tolerated. But the tenor of his intellectual life shifts when he is still quite young. His family are regular listeners to news reports on BBC Arabic World Service radio, and one day instead of the news, the presenter reads a short story by a young writer named Hosam Zowa, an allegorical fiction subtly critical of the regime. The story jolts Khaled into an elevated state of awareness of politics and the power of words, show more which is intensified when he learns that shortly after reading the story on the air, the presenter, who lives in London, has been assassinated. In 1983 Khaled, now eighteen, travels to Edinburgh to attend college. There he meets Mustafa al Touny, also Libyan, and the two become fast friends. In April of the following year, Mustafa persuades Khaled to accompany him to London to join a protest against the regime, taking place outside the Libyan embassy. But as the protesters are chanting, shots are fired at the crowd from within the embassy. Khaled and Mustafa are wounded and end up convalescing in hospital under police guard. Knowing his actions have placed him on the regime’s watchlist, Khaled is forced into a newly circumspect life. He does not return to Edinburgh, instead taking up residence in London, where he eventually becomes a teacher. Later still, a chance encounter in Paris brings him into contact with the writer, Hosam Zowa, and another friendship blossoms. Matar’s densely written but thoroughly engaging narrative closely follows Khaled’s life as an exile in London, through the remaining years of Qaddafi’s rule, the changes wrought by the Arab Spring, and the regime’s fall in 2011. Matar places Khaled at the centre of a story that swirls and shifts around him as momentous world events occur and other characters evolve and take up causes, while Khaled remains a fixed point. Invited by Mustafa and Hosam to return to Libya and join the popular resistance, he chooses instead to remain in London. Plot-wise, My Friends centres around the struggle of the Libyan people for freedom, but at its emotional core are Khaled’s many relationships, with Mustafa and Hosam, his family, and others. Khaled narrates this tale of human connection from the perspective of a man in his middle years who has seen much and experienced great change, and the tone of the book is contemplative tinged with melancholy. Elegantly written, My Friends tells a wise, intimate, profoundly moving story of love and loss that grips the reader until the final page. show less

Here we have two untranslatable experiences. The first is friendship, which, like all friendships, one cannot fully describe to anyone else. The second is grief, which again, like all forms of grief, is horrible exactly for how uncommunicable it is.
from My Friends by Hisham Matar

I was mesmerized by this novel from the first sentences describing the parting of friends of twenty years.

It was a short story by Hosam that opened Khaled to the power of words and inspired him to study English Literature. Walking home from the station after seeing Hosam off, Khaled muses on the arc of his life and his relationship with pivotal friends.

Khaled won a scholarship to study English Literature at Edinburgh, where he met Mustafa, also from Benghazi. show more They attended an anti-Qaddafi protest and were shot. Now marked men, hiding from spies, Khalid couldn’t tell his family what happened and why he couldn’t return home.

Khaled remembers the Edinburgh professor who befriended him; Rana, the Lebanese woman to whom he first he shared his secret and who later in life trusted him to keep hers; Claire, the English woman he loved and lost. He remembers the writers who shaped him; Hosam, recalling their early, deep friendship forged when they met in Paris, and Robert Louis Stevenson whose “ease of his sentences, which have the honest and vital momentum of nature” they both admired.

During the Arab Spring, Khaled watched Mustafa and Hosam return to Libya join the fight against Qaddafi, both changed forever by the experience. But he could not leave the life he had made in England, knowing if he returned to Libya he would be a man without a country.

With its themes of friendship, family, exile, literature, and love, this gorgeous and moving novel is one of my favorite 2023 reads.

Thanks to the publisher for a free book. show less

This story brings realism to the life of Khaled and his two close friends, Mustafa and Hosam, who participated in the revolution against Qaddafi’s empire in Libya.

It starts when Khaled was a young boy inspired by a story he heard on the radio about a cat that ate parts of a man – piece by piece. The only thing left was his head and torso which sounded like a bad dream to me. This man wasn’t able to fight back. Hosam also wrote a book which Khaled referred to several times. It was banned in almost all the Arab countries. Later by coincidence, Khaled met the author, Hosam, and they became instant friends.

Khaled was taking classes at the University of Edinburgh where he met Mustafa, also from Libya. They decided to participate in a show more protest in London against Qaddafi and were sent to the hospital after getting shot. Both healed along with a few others under tight security. This changed the course of their lives.

So many of us know very little about the history of Libya. I read this story slowly as there was much to digest. Khaled and his family and friends suffered from the emotional pain of what was happening in their country with the kidnappings, assassinations and too much blood on the streets. It gave me a grim look of what can happen when a country has a revolution and dictator in control. “How do you escape the demands of unreasonable men?”

The book is certainly thought provoking in many ways. The author’s strength is telling stories of the people. It almost felt like a memoir by Khaled with all the joys and deep concerns of life. He wrote about their families, love relationships, and struggles with the civil war. The characters: Khaled, Mustafa and Hosam were very believable in my mind with the strong bonds between them.

My thanks to Random House and NetGalley for providing me with an advanced copy of this book with an expected release date of January 9, 2024. show less

A deceptively quiet story about three Libyan friends whose lives are irrevocably changed after taking part in a protest against Qaddafi in London. Matar has a light touch, and the repercussions of standing up and speaking out against a repressive government are never hammered at, but he gets inside the head of his protagonist, Khaled, and his cycles of frustration, anger, and acceptance at being forced into exile at 18—and the novel is all the more moving for it. A small but forceful portrait of political and personal reverberations; recommended.

Real Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Return, a luminous novel of friendship, family, and the unthinkable realities of exile

The trick time plays is to lull us into the belief that everything lasts forever, and although nothing does, we continue, inside our dream.

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. 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 light years away show more 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 in tragedy. In a flash, Khaled finds himself injured, clinging to life, an exile, unable to leave England, 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 jeopardize their safety.

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 at the peak of his powers.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Beautiful writing, like: "The question is, my boy, and it has always has been the most important question, how to escape the demands of unreasonable men" and "It’s hard work hiding things, you have to watch yourself, how you walk even, how you eat and sleep and I am terrible at it, you know it." All the sentences I liked were much on this model. The gestalt, unfortunately, never rose above my appreciation for the author's writing talent.

The story left me...unmoved. You look at stories in the light shone by the world at the time they're read, and I read this during the Israeli genocide of the Gazans. My symapthy for this privileged whiner was severely attenuated.

Random House charges $12.99 for an ebook edition. show less