My Friends: A Novel

This lyrical novel chronicles the friendship of three Libyans who find themselves in unexpected exile in London for what proves to be 27 years. Matar’s gentle storytelling captures the fear, loneliness, anger, and forbearance of very different young men thrown together by longing for their families, for familiar landscapes, and for the lives they had expected to lead. In a remarkable evocation of the daily experience of alienation and adaptation, Matar conveys how they come to terms with their lives in exile while remaining quietly unreconciled to their fates—still “strapped to the old country.” When the 2011 uprising against the Libyan dictator Muammar al-Qaddafi erupts, the now middle-aged men confront the decades they have whiled away, stranded far from home, and two join the rebellion. This story is a haunting commentary on the long reach of tyranny.