My Friends

My Friends is Hisham Matar's 2024 fourth book, the structural successor to The Return (2016, Pulitzer Prize) and Matar's second novel after In the Country of Men (2006, Booker Prize shortlist) and Anatomy of a Disappearance (2011). The structural premise is three Libyan exiles — Khaled the narrator, Mustafa, and Hosam — who meet as undergraduate students in 1980s Edinburgh and navigate the next three decades of expatriate London life. The structural reference point is the April 17, 1984 shooting at the St. James's Square Libyan-embassy demonstration in London, during which a Libyan-government-agent firing from inside the embassy killed the protest organizer-and-Yvonne Fletcher, the Metropolitan Police officer policing the demonstration. The novel runs across the next approximately three decades of Khaled's London life, the parallel trajectories of Mustafa and Hosam, and the broader question of what political-and-personal exile across the long arc actually requires.

Matar's structural method is the patient close-first-person Khaled narration across the entire three-decade arc, with the broader Libyan-political-historical material (the 1984 embassy shooting, the 2011 Libyan revolution and the broader collapse of the Gaddafi regime, the contemporary post-Gaddafi political and personal-family aftermath) providing the structural setting that the contemporary American literary fiction tradition on contemporary North African political-and-personal exile has not historically committed to at this depth for the broader English-language audience. The Khaled-and-Hosam friendship across the entire novel carries the structural emotional weight; the Mustafa-departure-to-fight-in-the-2011-Libyan-revolution arc across the back half delivers the structural moral payoff that the broader friendship-and-exile arc has been preparing. The novel's structural argument (about how the operational mechanics of long-duration political exile across the late-twentieth-into-twenty-first-century arc produce specific kinds of friendship-and-individual recognition that the broader American literary fiction tradition has not historically committed to) is made through the texture of the friendship-chapter accumulation rather than through any direct argument.

Recommended as required contemporary American literary fiction reading, as the structural Matar return to fiction after The Return memoir, and as one of the canonical 2024 American literary novels. Compare to The Sympathizer (Viet Thanh Nguyen), On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (Ocean Vuong), and contemporary American literary fiction on exile. The Hisham Matar audiobook (author-narrated) is the definitive audio production. Five stars without reservation.