Hisham Matar, in continuing his trajectory that started with "In the Country of Men" describes his years in exile and his friendship with two Libyan compatriots in London. It is a brave book in that it explores all the conflicting dilemmas one feels with regard to returning and knowing that no one is safe in the shadow of dictatorship. Matar also captures his love of books, his identity as well as his father's, rooted in learning. What impact does years of exile have on identity? How do the realities of exile affect memory? How to mediate time as a factor?
Although it is a bit slow going at times, frankly, I could not put the book down.

My Friends is a novel that takes the reader on a powerful and emotional journey. It is a moving exploration of the ever-changing possibilities of friendships as they evolve throughout a lifetime. I was surprised by how much I enjoyed reading this book and was absorbed by the depth and complexity of the characters. There is a lot to reflect upon after finishing this. I look forward to reading more work by Hisham Matar.

Thank you to Random House and Netgalley for the advanced reader's copy.

This review will be posted on Goodreads and Amazon upon publication.

This was a book I did not want to end and I savored each beautifully written word. This is the story of loss, a story of friendship, a story of family, a story of exile, and it is told is a such an incredibly compelling way.

I grew to love Khaled deeply. He made me think about my privilege. He made me think about what kind of friend am I. He made me think about making others welcome... always.

I do not want to give the story away, but it spans years... years in exile, years worrying about being found, worrying about his family, and forging a new family with his friends.

This is a book that I won't stop thinking about and I highly recommend it!

I would like to thank Netgalley and Random House Publishing Group for the copy of this book.

What complicated friendships and life this man had, just shows you how a simple choice can change your life for the better or worse. The book was well written, but at times just boring, not something I looked forward to reading.

The simple title My Friends belies the powerful strength and beauty of friendship that Hisham Matar so eloquently and astonishingly writes about. The relationships in the book among family and friends are almost effervescent in their depth, and they are moving and heart rending.

The three friends, Khaled, Mustafa, and Hosham (a brilliant, quixotic writer) are from Libya, and when Mustafa and Khaled are living in London, they attend a rally against the Libyan government during which Khaled is grievously shot and Mustafa is also wounded. Khaled, 18 at the time, spends a long time recovering in the hospital, and he is unable to come to terms with this attack on him. His parents, of whom he is terribly fond, beg him to come back to Libya, but as he still tries to heal physically and to heal his attitude, he is unable to move forward in spite of the death of Qaddafi.

Khaled spends 27 years yearning for Libya and his family, and he seems lost and wandering between a longing for his homeland and his family. The richness of his life wraps around books and politics, a confusion that is interspersed with the brutal war in Libya.

The absolute beauty of this book builds as the years that Khaled lives in London keep him there, tied to the lives of his missing friends and family. It is impossible to put this book aside as it ties emotions and love tightly together.

Thank you to Penguin Random House and Net Gallery for the opportunity to read this amazing book. It is highly recommended.

Hisham Matar has written a deep and evocative novel about the complicated nature of male friendship, country and home, family and obligation, exile, and the sweeping power of history to change the direction of a life.

Although the novel spans decades in the lives of Khaled, the narrator, and his friends Mustafa and Hosam, it takes place in a single evening walk home after Khaled has seen Hosam board the train from London to Paris. It is a ruminative novel, told as if we were walking alongside Khaled on his walk through London and he were speaking out loud, mulling over the twists and turns of his life and the lives of his friends.

It is a novel of questions and reassessments, a novel of what-ifs. Matar has Khaled go over his life to understand the course it took once it was violently assimilated into the struggle against the Libyan regime. Khaled measures his reactions to the events of that struggle against those of his friends. Did he do enough? Was he too fearful, too reluctant, too selfish? Khaled would have preferred to live a life much like his father's, a life of intellect and literature, a life that did not attract the attention of regimes. A simple, safe, somewhat fulfilling life. But circumstances and small choices combine to set him on a collision course with history. Years later, he is still haunted by the memories, asking himself the difficult questions on a long walk home.

In Khaled, Mustafa, and Hosam, Matar has created complex and very human characters. Their interactions are never the same; friendships are complicated. Sometimes they are easy, emotions and attitudes are in sync, and the bond is palpable. At other times, the relationship can annoy or antagonize, the person you thought was a friend can appear an enemy or a stranger. It has been a long time since I've read a contemporary novel that presents male friendship at its center. These three men form bonds of love and brotherhood that survive distance, politics, and even history. Although at the end they are separated by distance, they each carry a part of one another.

Thanks to Random House (Jaylen) and NetGalley for an ARC of this wonderful novel.

A devastating and beautifully written novel. Very well written. Thank you to NetGalley for the advanced read.

In the early 1980’s, as the narrator is a teenager in Libya, he and his family listen to news about Libya not from local news stations but from London based BBC broadcasts. Qaddafi’s policies of torture and murder for Libyan dissidents have led to the departure from the country of all outspoken press and critics, and this is the chilling backdrop as My Friends begins. Soon, Khaled, the narrator, is a fortunate participant in a government approved program to attend university in Edinburgh, and is leaving home for the first time. We hear his father speak the universal message of countless parents sending off their adolescents, .. don’t get involved with bad friends or activities. The first third of this novel moves fairly quickly and suspensefully toward an unknown disaster and its immediate aftermath that the reader likely anticipates from that early warning. As a result of the incident, the paths of Khaled, the narrator, and his two closest friends, are changed forever. After this point, the momentum slows considerably, and the novel becomes a reflection on the emotional struggles in the past, present and future lives of these three exiled Libyans and their connections to their birth country. The book moves forward and back in time, and focuses increasingly on the Libyan political atmosphere and discontent during Qaddafi’s reign. Despite beautiful writing, and vivid, rich, emotional passages, the novel is heavy and meandering for much of the remainder. While this may have been deliberate to reflect the narrator’s anguished state of mind, it was harder to maintain interest. Had I been more familiar with this period of Libyan history, or had the novel offered more insight into daily life during the dictatorship, this section of the novel might have been more engaging. As a whole, this was a beautiful story of the ways in which youthful events and friendships can have dramatic, lifelong effects.

Thank you to Net Galley and Random House for this ARC.

A beautiful story about the power of words, friendship, and the concept of "home."

Can you ever really return home once you've left? At 18, a spur-of-the-moment decision forces Khaled into permanent exile from his family in Libya. The people rise up and dictatorships fall, but Khaled stays in London, unmoored--a person without a home who finds home in literature and friends who also live under the constant threat of discovery.

Matar writes, "[T]hough Benghazi was the one place I longed for the most, it was also the place I most feared to return to. The life I have made for myself here is held together by a delicate balance. I must hold onto it with both hands."

Matar's language and imagery are evocative and emotional, but man does this guy love long sentences. Another excerpt, on the same theme as the above: "[W]hat I want to return to I cannot return to because the place and I have changed and what I have built here might be feeble and meek, but it took everything I had and I fear if I leave I will not have the will to return and then I will be lost again and I have been lost before and will do everything not to be that again and that I do not know if it is cowardly or courageous and I do not care and I have decided without deciding, because it is my only option, to keep to the days, to sleep when it is good for me to sleep and wake in good time to attend to my work and the people who depend on me."

Normally this would turn me off, but instead it make me reread these passages to truly intuit the feeling behind them--to make sure I didn't miss anything along the journey. When Khaled feels lost, we can feel it in these long-winded sentences. We cannot stop to take a breath because neither can he.

Long-running tale of Libyan friends who emigrate out of country and how that decision affects their lives. Covering several decades, it's sometimes hard to figure out when the action is taking place. The writing style takes some getting used to also. I'd never read anything about Libyan history, so this was all new to me, and quite eye-opening.

I enjoyed this, something quite different than I normally read.

I received a complimentary copy of the book from the publisher and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

This was the first novel I have read about Libyan politics and the horrible repercussions of their infamous dictator. The story starts out with the protests by Libyan students in London on St. James Square and the true shootings of the protesters, The upheaval unites three Libyan students who stay friends for many decades, including through the “freeing” of Libya. The book is not a suspenseful page turner but instead is like a thoughtful memoir using language as art. I enjoyed the writing but be prepared for this to take you some time to get through. It will be worth it at the end.
Thank you NetGalley for the ARC.

My Friends by Hisham Matar is a serious, deep, descriptive book of Libyan history and the impact on three friends who lived, loved, and matured during several pivotal decades. The story is interesting and engrossing but at times, laborious to read with the intensity.

Thanks to NetGalley and Random House Publishing Group for the opportunity to read this ARC.

This story is a case study of living in exile. It affects different people different ways.

The 3 main characters, Khaled, Hosam, and Mustafa, each deal with it in different ways.
The main character, Khaled, wants to go home. His life is destroyed because he cannot go home.

This was not a light, easy read. I learned some Libyan history, but more importantly, I read about the internal conflict created by being an exile. Khaled lost the future he'd planned for himself.

Despite rating this book 4 stars, I'm not sure who I would recommend this book to.

This is an excellent book. It’s not light reading, but if you are, like me, not well versed in geopolitics
and the wars in the Middle East, this is a really up close and personal story with the relationships and
families and their lives as their children leave their homeland for education and exploration, only to
find themselves in situations for which they are not emotionally prepared. This is a book with families,
with young people who create families, and their conflicts with not being where they feel they should
be in time of conflict in their homeland. The story is very cohesive, and well detailed, which left me unable to
prepare a proper review because I was still thinking about my life compared to the adult decisions
the young men were making, and how their lives evolved as they matured.
This really is a well written, very detailed account of the horrors of war, but the strength and loyalties of
the families comes through. I am a better person for having read this book.
My thanks to Random House Publishing via NetGalley, for providing a download copy of this book’ for
review purposes. I appreciate the opportunity to read this book.

My Friends by Hisham Matar is a really thought-provoking coming of age story about a Libyan emigre to London (by way of Edinburgh) that traverses much of Qaddafi's dictatorship. Like a lot of coming of age stories, there's real honestly about the hubris of youth, but it's infused with much higher stakes.

At times I got a little bogged down in the storytelling - we would shift timelines often without notice, and I struggled to keep up with where we were in the story. But what a great story - the friendships, the revolution, the reality of being a Libyan in the UK. There is plenty to like and to learn from here!

4 stars. Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.

An interesting and "literary" novel about expatriates from Libya living in London. Khaled, the first-person narrator, lives in London eking out a meager living. His friend Hosam Zowa is a writer who led a failed revolution during the Arab Spring. Khaled remembers the time of oppression under Qaddafi and the brief feeling of liberation after his disposal, and then the regret as the new regime proved just as difficult as the old. Matar writes with lyrical poetry, vividly taking the narrator into the complex world of immigrants from a very different culture and feel.

I started this book on a whim and I am absolutely entranced. The writing is so crisp and the story has me completely absorbed. Honestly I know little about Libya and learning through Matar’s lyric prose is a delight. I am however a great lover of London - though a foreigner there too - so I relate to his experience. I have 70% of the book yet to go but I am savoring all of it!

What should have been a fascinating literary historical novel did not speak to me and i found it difficult to relate to. A young man of Syrian extraction, close to his family, moves to Great Britain for his education and remains there. He becomes friends with an author. There is much rumination on political events in Syria and elsewhere in the middle east. Unfortunately, I was not the correct target audience. Thanks to NetGalley for an early copy.

This book was a deep dive into a couple of important friendships in Khaled's life, providing perspective into how these relationships grow and evolve and become such a foundational point of reference in our personal timelines. I think having a better understanding of the inner workings of the country of Libya and the Arab Spring in general would have enhanced my understanding of many of the plot points, but the focus primarily remained on the human elements of his lasting relationships.

Thank you to NetGalley for the opportunity to read an advanced copy of this novel.

Thanks very much to Random House and NetGalley for the eARC of this quiet, moving novel of friendship.

My Friends opens in present-day London as its protagonist, Khaled, revisits memories of his dear friend Hosam after saying goodbye to him for what he believes is the last time.

Decades earlier, as a teenager in Libya, Khaled was forever changed upon hearing a memorably unusual short story written by Hosam read aloud on BBC Radio. After heading to the U.K. for university, an unexpected tragedy effectively traps Khaled in London, away from his beloved parents and sister, but luckily embraced by a wonderful “found family” ultimately made up of Hosam (whom he meets by chance), Khaled’s former classmate, Mustafa, and others. The shifting relationships between Khaled, Hosam, and Mustafa, from the 1980s through the Arab Spring and beyond, form the heart of the novel. (I don’t consider any of this to be a spoiler—and can you really “spoil” a character-driven novel like this, anyway? It’s all about the journey.)

My Friends addresses such weighty matters as how a moment can change the entire trajectory of one’s life; the difficulty of truly escaping a repressive regime, even when “in exile;” and the profound effect art can have when encountered at the exact right time.

I’ve not read any of Hisham Matar’s works before, but I will be remedying that after this. Highly recommend.