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Author: Matar, Hisham

Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945)

Published on 9 January 2025 by Penguin Books Ltd in the United Kingdom.

Paperback | 464 pages
197 x 128 x 27 | 324g

LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2024FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD 2024WINNER OF THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL FICTIONFROM THE PULITZER-PRIZE WINNING AUTHOR OF THE RETURN’A brilliant novel about innocence and experience, about friendship, family and exile’ COLM TOIBINKhaled and Mustafa meet at university in Edinburgh: two Libyan eighteen-year-olds expecting to return home after their studies. In a moment of recklessness and courage, they travel to London to join a demonstration in front of the Libyan embassy. When government officials open fire on protestors in broad daylight, both friends are wounded, and their lives forever changed.

Over the years that follow, Khaled, Mustafa and their friend Hosam, a writer, are bound together by their shared history. If friendship is a space to inhabit, theirs becomes small and inhospitable when a revolution in Libya forces them to choose between the lives they have created in London and the lives they left behind.

‘The first Booker contender of 2024 . . . a deeply touching, beautifully composed book’ Sunday Times’It is impossible to describe the profound depth and beauty of this book’ MAAZA MENGISTE, author of THE SHADOW KING’My Friends is both a complex and unsentimental meditation on what friendship means and a searingly moving exploration of how exile impacts those who are forced to live in this state of loss. It is a book that we loved for its spareness of language and its deeply affecting storytelling.’ Booker Prize Judges 2024