“Friend. What a word. Most use it about those they hardly know. When it is a wondrous thing.”
The 2024 Booker Prize longlist was announced on July 30th. Of the official “Booker Dozen,” I’d read only one: Percivall Everett’s James. (Feel free to look back for that review.) Prior to the announcement, I’d read an interview with the judges wherein they indicated that what they were looking for most in making their selections were books with heart. Having now read three of the thirteen, I’m becoming increasingly excited for this long list.
In 1984, armed men opened fire from inside the Libyan Embassy in London, turning submachine guns on a crowd of demonstrators protesting Qaddafi’s reign. Many in attendance were students. An officer was killed. Hisham Matar’s My Friends is the story of three Libyan men, students and scholars, who were at the demonstration and how their friendship, defined by the demonstration and exile, grew and changed over decades.
Khaled is our narrator, and the novel opens in 2016 with him seeing his friend Hosam off. Hosam and his family are heading to California and new beginnings. After Khaled drops him off at the station, he walks back to his flat, his feet retracing the steps that had led them to that point. Khaled had first met Hosam in 1995, but their history does go back further. Hosam was a well-known author, and Khaled had been hoping to meet him for years – even before he went to Edinburgh to study. And unbeknownst to Khaled for many years, Hosam was also at the demonstration.
The novel then takes us further back to Mustafa, a fellow classmate that Khaled met in 1983. It is Mustafa who takes him to the demonstration in London where they are both shot and become exiled from their home and families. They become as close if not closer than brothers. A decade later, Hosham becomes part of the friend group, much to Mustafa’s dismay. And later, Hosham and Mustafa have a relationship closer than Khaled could have imagined possible.
My Friends is a novel about truly never being able to go home again and trying to build a world you’re okay in. It’s about growing up and growing apart. It’s about seeing our heroes as fallible, and building our friendships around that. It’s about surviving when rootless and bleeding in a street.
Khaled’s repeated search for belonging, for safety, for something stable while also wanting to go home, the nervous condition being in exile has created in him, is just wonderfully done; it’s simply a gorgeous novel that is full of heart. I can see why it made the list
Read this book.
Booker Count: 2 of 13
A Girl Named Tommi 