My Friends

August 1, 2023

Having left behind the constraints of his native Libya to study at the University of Edinburgh, Khaled joins a protest against Qaddafi's regime in London shattered by violence, leaving him badly injured. He can't risk contacting his parents for their own safety but finds comfort and insight in a friendship he forms with Hosam Zowa, an author who influenced him as a child. Matar was Booker short-listed for his novel In the Country of Men and a Pulitzer Prize winner for his memoir The Return. Prepub Alert.

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Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from November 13, 2023
Pulitzer winner Matar (for The Return, a memoir) presents a poised and poignant story of a Libyan dissident exiled in the United Kingdom during the Qaddafi era. In 1983, 17-year-old Khaled leaves Benghazi to study literature in Edinburgh, where he meets excitable Mustafa. While attending an anti-Qaddafi protest in London they are both shot by pro-Libyan gunmen. They survive, and Khaled cuts himself off from his family so as not to endanger them back home. In 1995, Khaled cements a friendship with dissident writer Hosam Zowa, whose work has attracted the ire of the Qaddafi regime. The danger the three men face shapes their relationship, as Hosam initially suspects Khaled of being a secret agent for Qaddafi. Eventually, though, their solidarity and mutual love of literature contribute to a tight bond including Mustafa, which holds strong even after Hosam and Mustafa return to Libya in 2011 to join the Arab Spring uprising while Khaled stays behind in London. Khaled’s elegiac ruminations never throttle the suspense as the characters continuously risk their lives for Libyan liberation. This is both a melancholic examination of the horrors of repression and a powerful ode to the freedom of speech.

December 1, 2023

The latest by award winner Matar (My Friends) explores the overriding theme of translation: on the surface, what is lost when literature is translated from one language to another, but also how an outsider translates himself into a culture not his own. The novel follows Khaled, a young Libyan who receives a scholarship to attend the University of Edinburgh. His classmate Mustafa persuades him to attend a protest against the Qaddafi regime at the Libyan Embassy in London. In the chaos of the demonstration, both Khaled and Mustafa are shot and wounded, setting the course for the rest of Khaled's life. Unable to return to Libya for fear of retribution against himself or his family, he remains in limbo, incapable of committing to a long-term romantic relationship or decisive political action. Khaled's in-between existence is contrasted against his two friends: Mustafa, with whom he is inextricably linked due to their shared past, and Hosam Zowa, a dissident writer from a prominent Benghazi family, whom he meets by chance in Paris. VERDICT Especially in the novel's second half, Khaled's lack of driving force begins to feel stale, but the sense of loss of home, and eventually of friendship, is movingly rendered.--Christine DeZelar-Tiedman

Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 1, 2023
An 18-year-old student from Benghazi attending the University of Edinburgh, Khaled was nervous about attending the demonstration. His fellow Libyan, Mustafa, convinced him to come to London to protest the Qaddafi regime. When men inside the embassy opened fire with a machine gun on the protesters, Khaled was shot in the chest. His physical recovery is only the beginning of his journey in this powerful novel. At once dissecting the loneliness of exile and meditating on the ripple effects of loss and longing, Matar's (The Return, 2016) novel examines three distinct responses to tyranny through the stories of three men. Before leaving Benghazi, Khaled had been captivated by a short story read on a BBC news broadcast by a Libyan author named Hosam. Fifteen years later, Khaled meets his fellow exile, and they form a deep friendship that is later tested when Hosam and Mustafa return to Libya during the Arab Spring to fight for freedom. Khaled somberly reflects on feeling left behind by his old friends in his carefully constructed life far from home.

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Starred review from January 15, 2024
A Libyan exile contemplates his time away from his troubled homeland. Khaled Abd al Hady, the narrator of Matar's third novel, moved to England for college in 1983, well aware of the risks of encountering people criticizing his homeland. Years earlier, on BBC Arabic World Service radio, he'd heard an allegorical short story by a young Libyan writer, Hosam Zowa, criticizing the Qaddafi regime; shortly after, the Arab announcer reading the story was assassinated. Still, at the prompting of a friend and classmate, Mustafa al Touny, he attends a protest at the Libyan embassy in London and is nearly killed by gunfire from inside the building. "Forever a marked man," he can't return home to his parents and sister in Benghazi or even share word of his injuries and their cause. As the years pass, Khaled settles into British life, finding and befriending Hosam as his friendship with Mustafa deepens; one running theme of the book is that friendship offers a space for honesty and affection that's often foreclosed by family and country. Still, the mood is melancholy, and Matar captures it gorgeously: "It turns out it is possible to live without one's family. All one has to do is to endure each day and gradually, minute by minute, brick by brick, time builds a wall." Plotwise, the novel operates at a relatively low boil, and even passages on political and religious strife are delivered with a sinuous, Jamesian reserve. The Arab Spring of 2011 intensifies matters, prompting Khaled and his cohort to decide how much to engage in it. But even here, Matar is more philosophical than heated, exploring what sides of ourselves we deny for the sake of a cause. While some around Khaled engage in the revolution, he, like the book, is more restrained, echoing Hosam's notion that "there is no salvation in war." A subtle, graceful, intimate exploration of loss and disconnection.

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