AUDIOBOOK
About
WINNER OF THE 2024 ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL FICTION • LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE • One of Publishers Weekly Top Ten Books of the Year • A "masterly" (The New York Times), "riveting" (The Atlantic) novel of friendship, family, and the unthinkable realities of exile, from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Return.
"Quite possibly Hisham Matar's best work yet. . . . Very few writers alive can converse with negative space the way Matar does, and My Friends is stunning, beautiful proof." -Omar El Akkad, Scotiabank Giller Prize–winning author of What Strange Paradise
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, 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. *WINNER OF THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL FICTION*
*FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION*
*FINALIST FOR THE ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE IN FICTION*
*LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE*
*A GLOBE AND MAIL BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR*
*A WASHINGTON POST TOP 10 BOOK OF THE YEAR*
*A NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR*
"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. . . ."
-The 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."
-The Washington Post
"A masterly literary meditation on [Matar's] lifelong themes."
-The New York Times
[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. -James Wood, The New Yorker
"Such a success . . . My Friends is a significant novel, whose ambition and range are indicated by its long opening sentence, which winds between past and present."
-Financial Times
"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."
-The Wall Street Journal
"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 grad
"Quite possibly Hisham Matar's best work yet. . . . Very few writers alive can converse with negative space the way Matar does, and My Friends is stunning, beautiful proof." -Omar El Akkad, Scotiabank Giller Prize–winning author of What Strange Paradise
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, 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. *WINNER OF THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL FICTION*
*FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION*
*FINALIST FOR THE ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE IN FICTION*
*LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE*
*A GLOBE AND MAIL BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR*
*A WASHINGTON POST TOP 10 BOOK OF THE YEAR*
*A NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR*
"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. . . ."
-The 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."
-The Washington Post
"A masterly literary meditation on [Matar's] lifelong themes."
-The New York Times
[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. -James Wood, The New Yorker
"Such a success . . . My Friends is a significant novel, whose ambition and range are indicated by its long opening sentence, which winds between past and present."
-Financial Times
"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."
-The Wall Street Journal
"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 grad