About the Author

Hisham Matar was born in New York to Libyan parents, spent his childhood in Tripoli and Cairo and has lived most of his life in London. His memoir The Return was the recipient of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize, the PEN/Jean Stein Award and the Rathbones Folio Prize among others, and was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford, the Costa Biography and the National Book Critics Circle Awards. He is also the author of In the Country of Men, shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Anatomy of a Disappearance, and A Month in Siena. His most recent novel, My Friends, won the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction 2024. Matar is a Professor at Barnard College, Columbia University. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Academy of Arts. His work has been translated into over thirty languages.

Reviews

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

I have always admired Matar's tender and compassionate but equally strong and compelling voice
*Elif Shafak*

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*

'I could not love this book more. Reflective, compelling, deeply tender at times, there are surprising shifts and turns and moments of utter brilliance where new understanding blooms. A walk across London from King’s Cross Station to Shepherd's Bush gives rise to memories of a life diverted by a moment of political action. About friendship, exile, belonging, lives lived and not lived, and Libya's recent past, London emerges as a place of refuge, a transitory half-home even after three decades, a stepping stone. As soon as I finished, I started again beguiled by Matar’s long, sinuous sentences and enlivened by my new knowledge of what it was all about, my heart moving in my chest. My Friends is the most beautiful, complete, masterful novel I have read in a long time. Read it.'
*Priscilla Morris, author of the Women's Prize shortlisted BLACK BUTTERFLIES*

Tender, precise, and incredibly moving, MY FRIENDS is a rare novel, holding so much of the human heart that it is at times unbearably real. It’s impossible to read this book without feeling a renewed connection to the world and all its intricate sorrow and love.
*Seán Hewitt, author of ALL DOWN DARKNESS WIDE*

Poignant and quietly suspenseful... Readers encountering Matar for the first time will find in “My Friends” a masterly literary meditation on his lifelong themes. For those who already know his work, the effect is amplified tenfold.
*New York Times*

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*

A richly sustained meditation on exile and friendship, love and distance, deepening with each page as layers of recollection and experience accrue
*Alexandra Harris, chair of the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction judging panel*

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 novel about friendship, intimacy, and making new lives in cities – set in the context of geopolitics and exile, it is very much My Thing
*Guardian Summer Reads*

My Friends is quite possibly Hisham Matar’s best work yet, and that’s saying something. A quiet detonation of a novel, this masterful inquiry into the nature of friendship, exile and place is not so much to be read as lived through. The depth of thought, the unflinchingly honest confrontation with loss and longing, is there on every page, in every moment. Very few writers alive can converse with negative space the way Matar does, and My Friends is stunning, beautiful proof.
*Omar El Akkad, author of AMERICAN WAR and WHAT STRANGE PARADISE*

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*

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
*Literary Review*

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*

My Friends is Matar's most political novel, but also an intimate meditation on friendship and love and everything in between. It is deeply affecting, generous and wise, and all these virtues come in writing of extraordinary elegance, with one of those voices that you want to listen to for the rest of your life.
*Juan Gabriel Vásquez*

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*

Manage[s] the difficult trick of being political and personal as well as telling a great story
*The Irish Times - The best books of 2024 so far*

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*

A moving meditation on friendship and exile from the Booker-shortlisted novelist
*The Guardian - Summer reading*

I have always admired Matar's tender and compassionate but equally strong and compelling voice
*Elif Shafak*

My Friends is Matar's most political novel, but also an intimate meditation on friendship and love and everything in between. It is deeply affecting, generous and wise, and all these virtues come in writing of extraordinary elegance, with one of those voices that you want to listen to for the rest of your life.
*Juan Gabriel Vásquez*

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*