Hisham Matar presenting “My Friends: A Novel” in conversation with JAMES WOOD

Harvard Book Store welcomes HISHAM MATAR—author of the Pulitzer Prize winning memoir The Return and Booker Prize shortlisted novel In the Country of Men—for a discussion of his new novel My Friends. He will be joined in conversation by JAMES WOOD—staff writer at The New Yorker and Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism at Harvard University.

About My Friends

One evening, as a young boy growing up in Benghazi, Khaled hears a bizarre short story read aloud on the radio, about a man being eaten alive by a cat. Obsessed by the power of those words—and by their enigmatic author, Hosam Zowa—Khaled eventually embarks on a journey that will take him far from home, to pursue a life of the mind at the University of Edinburgh.

There, thrust into an open society that is light years away from the world he knew in Libya, Khaled begins to change. He attends a protest against the Qaddafi regime in London, only to watch it explode in tragedy. In a flash, Khaled finds himself injured, clinging to life, an exile, unable to leave England, much less return to the country of his birth. To even tell his mother and father back home what he has done, on tapped phone lines, would jeopardize their safety.

When a chance encounter in a hotel brings Khaled face to face with Hosam Zowa, the author of the fateful short story, he is subsumed into the deepest friendship of his life. It is a friendship that not only sustains him, but eventually forces him, as the Arab Spring erupts, to confront agonizing tensions between revolution and safety, family and exile, and how to define his own sense of self against those closest to him.

A devastating meditation on friendship and family, and the ways in which time tests—and frays—those bonds, My Friends is an achingly beautiful work of literature by an author at the peak of his powers.

Praise for My Friends

“It is impossible to describe the profound depth and beauty of this book. My Friends is a breathtaking novel, every page a miracle and an affirmation. If there is a language of exile, My Friends is what it sounds like: exquisite and painful, compassionate and unflinching, and, above all, overwhelming in its boundless hope that within exile rests a path toward a different kind of return—one that leads us back to ourselves. Hisham Matar is one of our greatest writers. How lucky we are to be in his midst.” —Maaza Mengiste, author of The Shadow King, shortlisted for the Booker Prize

“Hisham Matar’s My Friends recounts an exile’s life shattered by violence, yet sustained, fiercely if complicatedly, by friendship. An unforgettable novel—wise, urgent, and profound—from one of our era’s great writers.” —Claire Messud, author of The Emperor’s Children

“My Friends is a brilliant novel about innocence and experience, about friendship, family, and exile. It makes clear, once more, that Hisham Matar is a supremely talented novelist.” —Colm Tóibín, New York Times bestselling author of The Magician