Literary Award Winners Fiction Book Club discussion

Please comment here on 'My Friends' by Hisham Matar, 2025 Natonal Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. (It was shortlisted for the 2024 National Book Award for fiction and was long listed for the 2024 Booker Prize)

This book was a reread for me. My rating from the first time I read it has not changed!

4.5 stars. A thought provoking novel about three Libyans in exile in London due to the Gaddafi regime. The novel begins with a rash spontaneous decision to attend an anti-Qaddafi protect in London in 1984. The story is narrated by a Libyan exile named Khalid Abd al Hady, who left Benghazi in 1983 for Edinburgh University when he was 17 years old. He had lived in London for 32 years and tells his story, beginning with being one of the demonstrators outside the Libyan Embassy in 1984. He is with two Libyan friends who would be his closest friends. Zowa, who leaves just prior to the demonstration, and Mustafa al Touny.

Khaled’s presence at the 1984 demonstration makes it impossible for his to return to Libya. London becomes Khaled’s unintended home for decades.

A poignant, beautifully written novel about friendships, a sense of place, and life in general. Highly recommended.

This book is as good, if not better than his other novels, ‘In the Country of Men’, and ‘Anatomy of Disappearance’, and his non fiction book, ‘The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between’, all of which I recommend.

I read this over the summer and thought it was amazing. Your post captures it so well.