A melancholy meditation on exile and friendship. Hisham manages to escape the totalitarian grip of Libya when he gets a scholarship to Edinburgh University but it's not that simple. His friend Mustafa, the only other actual scholar in the group of Libyan students (the others being watchers) persuades him to attend a protest at the Libyan Embassy in London- a decision that changes both their lives after Khaled is shot. Woven throughout is the relationship Hisham builds with Hosam, a writer whose work has inspired him even as it enraged the regime. This moves between London, Edinburgh, Paris, and, of course, Libya in a meandering way. And then there's 2011 and the revolution, There are plot threads that pop in and out and seem unresolved (such a Khaled's relationship with a woman which feels as though there needed to be a female character) and times when this sags. It does, however, offer insight into the difficulty faced by exiled opponents of a brutal regime. Thanks to netgalley for the ARC. An interesting read for fans of literary fiction.

A very touching story about the ramifications of dictatorship on innocents. The scenery and relationship descriptions are beautiful and sometimes heartbreaking. I appreciated being in England, Paris, and Libya. Getting to know Kahled and his friends. Thinking about life in the 80’s. Thank you NetGalley for the ARC.

A young man must forge a new path when one decision upends his life.

Khaled grew up in the city of Benghazi in Libya during the years when the country was ruled by Qaddafi. His father, a school teacher, was highly educated but realized that it was better not to pursue lofty professional goals in a country under such an oppressive ruler. The family regularly listened to broadcasts from the BBC Arabic station, and one day during his teenage years something unusual happened. The broadcaster, Mohammed Mustafa Ramadan, read aloud not the news but a short story written by a young Libyan named Hosam Zola who was studying at Trinity College in Dublin. The story, unusual and with undertones of anti-government sentiment, inspired Khaled to want to study literature abroad, and a few years later in 1983 he was lucky enough to win one of the government’s scholarships to do just that. He headed off to the University of Edinburg and met other Libyan students there, including Mustafa, a former student of his father’s. He became aware that there were embedded amongst the Libyan students those who had been tasked with keeping tabs on the actions of others; those who did not act in accordance with the LIbyan government’s views could quickly find themselves sent back home to LIbya or worse. Yet when, in the aftermath of the rounding up and imprisoning of university students back in Libya, a protest is scheduled to take place outside the Libyan embassy in London, Khaled is persuaded by Mustafa to travel down to be there. Despite not being terribly political himself, Khaled finds himself in the very thick of the protest and both he and Mustafa are injured when people inside the embassy start shooting at the protesters. In that moment, the trajectory of Khaled’s life is forever altered. He dares not either return to the university, where the timing of his absence and his injuries will surely reveal to the student “spies” that he was involved in the protest, nor does he dare return home lest his involvement is already suspected and he and his family will suffer because of it. His life is now one in exile, from his homeland and to a large degree from his family as well. Khaled cobbles together a life with the help of friends he has made and will continue to make, including Hosam Zola himself, as the country from which he is exiled goes through its own changes.
My Friends is both a beautifully written novel and a piercing portrayal of life for those under an oppressive regime and those who have fled it. The author, whose own family ran afoul of Qaddafi and fled Libya for Egypt, has much from which to draw as he tells the story of Khaled, the accidental exile. From the government campaign to silence journalists critical of the Qaddafi regime through targeted murders, as happens to the BBC broadcaster in this novel, to the acceptance that as there is always someone listening in to what you say whether talking among friends in a dormitory or chatting with your family on the phone, a level of care must be taken to ensure that one doesn’t attract the wrong attention, life in such places is very different from what most people experience in the West. The reader comes to know Khaled and his friends well, how each approaches their lives in exile and their different views upon and actions taken during the Arab Spring and the Libyan revolution. Even the eventual removal of Qaddafi from the leadership of Libya does not mean that life for any of these men can return to normal. The choices they have made and the roles they have assumed continue to alter the course of their lives. I was thoroughly entranced throughout this novel, at times feeling like I was at the feet of Scheherazade hearing tales of family, love and loss. This novel is one that will appeal to readers of authors like MIchael Cunningham, whose gift of language makes reading such a pleasure, as well as those of writers like Claire Messud and Téa Obreht who bring to life other parts of the world. Many thanks to NetGalley and Random House Publishing Group for allowing me access to an advanced reader’s copy of this beautiful novel.

This was engrossing. It’s a quiet book on the surface, but so much happened underneath. It’s the story of a young Libyan man who goes to Edinburgh to study. On a trip to London with a friend, he becomes involved in a demonstration about his home country. Thereafter, he is unable to return to his old life, and continues to live in London. Through knowing him and his friends, the Arab Spring came to life intimately.

The novel is the beautiful, melancholy, political, and personal story of three Libyan men both inside and outside their home country from the late 70's through the years following the Arab Spring and the fall of Qaddafi. As a reader, we learn what it is like to live under a tyrannical regime where those brave enough to oppose the regime are silenced. All three have engaged in political acts. Hosam writes a political allegory that is read in place of the news one night on the BBC-sponsored Arabic radio station. This story captivates the narrator of the novel, Khaled, who later goes to study at the University of Edinburgh and at the urging of his much more politically fearless friend Mustafa, attends the protest at the Libyan Embassy in London in 1984 and, along with Mustafa, is seriously wounded when the embassy soldiers open fire. Khaled tells us the story as he walks through London after saying goodbye to Hosam, for what he thinks will be the last time.

These early actions shape and resonate through the lives of the three friends over the succeeding thirty years. Most poignantly, these actions keep all three friends in a constant state of fear and also make it impossible to connect with their families except on tapped phone lines and through censured letters. The author uses this history to explore what it means to be without a home and the challenges of building lasting relationships, What does one owe one's family, one's country, one's friends? While Mustafa is a more a man of action, what grounds the narrator and Hosam is their love of literature--a connection formed from the reading/hearing of that early allegory. Literature also connects Khaled with his father. It is a novel of stasis--Khaled stays in the same apartment for thirty years--unlike Hosam and Mustafa he does not return to fight with the resistance in 2011. It is also a novel about violent action and its aftermath--the protest, the assassination of a prominent BBC broadcaster, and the capture of Qaddaffi. But it seems to be mostly about the loss of deep connections--to homeland and family and what that does to the friends over the course of their lives. Matar's book is both intellectual and emotional. He approaches his characters critically but with immense empathy.

MY FRIENDS
Hisham Matar

This is my first time reading Hisham Matar and it won't be my last.

In MY FRIENDS we are following Khaled throughout his lifetime. From his young life and then to separating himself from his family, becoming a protestor, and then beginning a new life amidst a personal tragedy. All along the way, and to varying degrees, he has his friends, and the book is as much about them as it is about Khaled.

I once was told that sometimes two people can receive or download an idea for a book at the same time. This book, MY FRIENDS, could only have been written by Matar at this time with his experiences and his mastery of language.

It could only have been written from a place of understanding and gratitude. A thankfulness for life and those you spend living it with.

MY FRIENDS is unique in its origination. Matar carries language differently and expresses himself uniquely so. Every third sentence was an aha moment. I was struck by his insightfulness and won over by his clarity of thought.

MY FRIENDS is about the important role your friends play in your life. How sometimes friendships can be far more significant than others. Especially at times when we can be more impressionable than is personally safe.

MY FRIENDS is filled with romantic notions of dying for what you believe in, living for what you'd die for, and writing like your soul is on fire.

I loved this book and felt inspired to investigate Matar’s backlist. Have you heard of Hisham Matar? You have now! MY FRIENDS comes out tomorrow where books are sold. You should pick it up!

Thanks to Netgalley, Random House Publishing Group - Random House, and Random House for the advanced copy and for putting this on my radar!

MY FRIENDS…⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Beautiful writing. It was a pleasure to read My Friends and spend time with Khaled and his insights, longing, regrets, and reminiscences. The writing was clear and full of emotion. I thought the pacing was slow in the best, most luxurious way. A literary treat!

Thank you very much to Random House and NetGalley for the opportunity to read a copy.

My Friends by Hisham Matar is a deeply profound, thought provoking and troubling book written about life in Libya under the reign of Muammar Gaddafi. It is a personal character study illuminating the inner life of an exiled Libyan man living in London as he experiences the glory of family and friends and the devastation of tyranny. I would like to thank Netgalley, the publisher and the author for providing me with a review copy in exchange for my honest and unbiased opinion of this book.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning and Booker short-listed author Hisham Matar returns with a novel about friendship set against the backdrop of Muammar Qaddafi’s reign of terror in Libya. In 1980, 14 year old Khalid Abd al Hady is listening to the BBC Arabic World Service with his family in Benghazi when the radio host, Mohammad Mustafa Ramadan (who is assassinated a month later by the Libyan government which hs targeted journalists), reads a short story by Hosam Zowa. It was this tale, and Professor Walbrooks’ meditation on the “infidelities of translation,” that led Khalid to attend college in Edinburgh despite his parents’ concern that if you left Libya in 1983, “there would be few reasons why you would want to return.”

Feeling the weight of the regime’s gaze on his back, paranoia impacted his relationships, but Khalid feels comfortable befriending another Libyan student, Mustafa, who had studied at the school where Khalid’s father had served as headmaster. Khalid and Mustafa recklessly attend a demonstration in front of the Libyan Embassy in London where eleven Libyan students are shot and a policewoman is killed by Qaddafi troops. Khalid and Mustafa suffer grievous injuries from which they recover, but April 17, 1984 was the date that Khalid “was forever thereafter a marked man with limited opportunities.”

Because Khalid is unable to return to Libya, and is stranded in a foreign city where he knows few, he ponders whether it is possible to have a happy life away from one’s home and one’ family. His friendship with Mustafa endures, and then Khalid meets Hosam when Khalid is 29 years old. Hosam forms the “third in their triangle.” Khalid builds a fragile life over 27 years in England but, at 45 years old, unmarried, childless, and living in a rented flat, he is left unsettled and ashamed by the fall of the regime and his failure to return to Libya unlike his friends who were proving themselves on the battlefield.

Matar has crafted a novel about friendship, exile and alienation. In his nonlinear exploration of friendship, Matar drops hints about his characters’ future and then circles back to fill in the details. For example, the reader learns early in the novel that Hosam does not stay with his English girlfriend Claire but, rather, marries and has a child with his cousin, Malak, and they start a new life in America. “My Friends” is intimate, modest and so unassuming that you might overlook its artistry. Although at times ponderous, it is deeply affecting. Thank you Random House and Net Galley for providing me with an ARC of this important novel.

This beautifully written novel explores the life of one man after he makes one fateful decision that impacts the remainder of his life and his ability to return to his home country. The friendships in this book are varied and complicated and affected by life in exile from their home countries. Khaled is a compelling and believable character and I wanted to keep reading about his life in London. The writing is exquisite and I highlighted so many sentences throughout the book. I am so glad to end the year with this book. Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for an advance review copy.

A moving story of life, family, friendships, politics. A wonderfully written account of Khaled’s life and how so many events affected him personally and his relationships. Even though it's fiction, rtis reads like a historical memoir. I learned quite a bit about Libya. Thank you NetGalley for providing the ARC.

What happens when a young man leaves his home in Libya to study in England and suddenly finds he cannot go home—maybe ever. This is a very introspective study of one such person, how he manages to build a life for himself, survives his mistakes, struggles with the secrets he must keep, and examines his own motivations in Libya’s struggle for freedom. The characters are so very likable and inhabit the very real world of Libya’s dictatorship and unrest that it reads like a nonfiction account. A very thought provoking story and one that will linger in memory.

Thanks to NetGalley and Penguin Random House for the ARC to read and review.

The new year of books will get off to a thought-provoking start with the early January release of Pulitzer Prize winning writer Hisham Matar’s My Friends, a captivating novel that will entertain while educating readers about the Qaddafi regime in Libya. In a sense, this is an historical novel, but, more importantly, Matar shows history’s effects on humanity.

From sentence one, Matar lets readers into Khaled’s mind, and a rather confused mind it is as Khaled watches long-time friend Hosam Zowa walk away across the concourse at King’s Cross Station, preparing to board a train for Paris and then join his wife and daughter in Northern California. If the opening short chapters seem more introspective and confusing than you prefer, making you feel you need to know more to understand Khaled’s thoughts, don’t worry. The pace with soon pick up and the picture become clearer. Before long, I had difficulty setting the book down. Three chapters (only a few pages) before the end, I purposefully set it down overnight because I didn’t want it to end so soon.

Tempted to follow Hosam Zowa to Paris, Khaled instead decides to make the long walk home to Shepherd’s Bush, the London neighborhood where he has lived in a small flat since shortly after his arrival in London in 1984. It is now Friday evening, November 18, 2016, and 50-year-old Khaled is about to relive his life while passing places that spark vivid, sometimes heart-breaking, memories. Whether recalling March 1980 when legendary BBC Arabic World Service journalist Mohammad Mustafa Ramadan surprised 14-year-old Khaled and his family by reading a short story by the unknown writer Hosam Zowa rather than reporting the news, the way Zowa’s story led 18-year-old Khaled to Edinburgh to study four years later, his life-changing trip with university friend Mustafa al Touny to participate in an anti-Qaddafi demonstration in front of London’s Libyan embassy the following spring, the secrets he keeps from his parents and sister back home in Benghazi, the Qaddafi regime’s vicious crackdown on dissident journalists and other members of the intelligentsia, changes in his friendships brought about by the 2011 Libyan revolution when his friends chose to go home to fight, and any number of other events shaping him, Khaled ponders his life. Fragmented memory by fragmented memory, readers come to know Khaled as well as his friends Mustafa al Touny and Hosam Zowa, but also others such as Professor Henry Walbrook, Rana Lamesse, Hannah, and even works of literature.

“As foolish to think we are free of history as it would be of gravity,” Hosam Zowa remarks. Yet individual responses to history differ. After a long night-time walk accompanied by a lifetime of memories, Khaled finally reaches his small London flat. Exactly what readers make of Khaled Abd al Hady’s life will be up to each to decide. Matar’s brief ending seemed perfect to me.

Thanks to NetGalley and Random House for this gem by Hisham Matar.

Posted on GoodReads and Barnes & Noble

I loved this book. It was an amazing story of life, love, family, friendships. I found myself coming back to this story and in the heartbreak and tragedy finding hope and connection. You will not be disappointed in this story at all. All the characters are so real I found my heart feeling for their journeys on every page. I read a NetGalley copy and will be recommending it to all.

This was a whirlwind of a story. It makes you think about what is worth fighting for and how you can love a place but not agree with its leader's views. This book will stay with you long after you put it down.

Growing up in Benghazi, Kahlid is affected by hearing a short story about a man eaten alive by a cat. He enrolls in the University of Edinburgh where he remains friends with Mustafa, also from his home town. When Mustafa convinces him to attend a political protest at the Libyan Embassy in London where violence erupts, Kahlid’s life is forever changed. The two young men can no longer return to either their home country nor to Edinburgh. Thus, Kahlid begins the life of an exile living in London.

He does have the opportunity to meet the author of the short story that had such an impact on him and they become friends. As the Arab Spring dawns and the political situation in Libya escalates, his two friends eventually choose a different path from him, returning to their homeland to be a part of the revolution.

Khalid recounts his history while taking a walk about his adopted city, passing places of significance, including where that protest took place. The novel is based on true events in the tortuous history of Libya (and the protest in London) and the effects of this history on three fictional friends.

Beautifully written and introspective, the novel expresses the pain of living in exile away from family and the countryside one loved as a child, as well as the constant fear experienced by political exiles. It was a bit of a slow read for me as Khalid’s musings do tend to meander and I wanted to reflect on every one of his thoughts and experiences.

This novel reads like a memoir and the reader experiences the lonely life of living in political exile. The story takes place during the reign of Gaddafi in Lybia. Three young men build a friendship while living in London. They share the same homeland, a love of literature and their experiences forms an unusually strong bond.
This is a book about family, loss and friendship.

Thank you NetGalley for this ARC

My Friends, by Hisham Matar.

Thank you to Random House and NetGalley for and advance reader’s copy of this book.

In present-day London, as Khaled abd al Hady takes a circuitous, long walk home from what may be a final farewell to his best friend, he visits the sites that define his life as a long-time exile in London. Like his walk, his mind circles around the events and people that have brought him to middle-age.

Relentlessly self-analyzing, this fictional character inhabits the persona of one of the 11 real Libyan protesters against their country’s dictatorship, shot by their own government from their London embassy in April 1984. Occurring deep in Qaddafi’s regime, this changes the trajectory of Khaled’s life. Now marked as a dissident, he cannot return home, continue with his British education (allowed and funded by the Libyan government), or even explain himself to his parents, for fear they may be implicated and suffer because of his actions.

Through the course of the book, and the more than 30 years that follow the protest, Khaled is preoccupied with his two closest Libyan friends, also in exile, questioning their motives and decisions, and especially, his own. He speaks of great affection and loyalty, coupled with absence and suspicion, of intense connections and unfathomable silence. He sometimes sees these friends as representing the separate and irreconcilable parts of his own life, as he seeks a balance between action and intellectual understanding, but takes little action, and endlessly analyzes motives and relationships.

This book may be powerful and thought-provoking, even profound, but it is not enjoyable. Too much time is spent in the middle-aged, displaced narrator’s mind and memories, as he recalls his long exile from his Libyan home. The brighter parts of his life – his dedicated and respected teaching career, his long-time loving relationship with an Englishwoman, his early life in a loving and supportive family – seem incidental, as he ponders the major turning point in his youth, when almost casual actions upended his life.

There are tantalizing themes that are touched on - for example, the challenge of translating work and experiences between languages - but ultimately this story of displacement and despair seems too specific and myopic to generalize beyond its narrator’s obsessive and depressive recollections.

Thank you Net Galley and Random House for the ARC copy of this book.

I really enjoyed this book. I learned a bit about Libya and some of their conflicts. It was so sad to see how the life of Khaled, living in exile, was formed based on one decision he made as a young man. It showed the value of true friends in one’s life, especially for someone who is unable to return home to family and the life they once knew. This was a well written book with a unique storyline.

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. 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.