Book Club: My Friends, by Hisham Matar

An intensely moving novel about three friends living in political exile and the emotional homeland that deep friendships can provide.

Khaled 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. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Hisham Matar is an American born British-Libyan writer. Trained as an architect, Hisham began writing poetry and experimented in theatre. He began writing his first novel In the Country of Men in early 2000. In the autumn of 2005, the publishers Penguin International signed a two-book deal with him, and the novel was a huge success, later shortlisted for the 2006 Man Booker Prize. Matar's memoir of the search for his father, The Return, won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography and the 2017 PEN America Jean Stein Book Award.

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Monthly meet up to discuss a great read, along with drinks & good company

Open to everyone | Booking required 

Bar open