My Friends

Khaled Abd al Hady leaves Benghazi in 1983, still in his teens, to study at the University of Edinburgh, and never goes home. At Edinburgh he befriends another Libyan student, Mustafa al Touny, who persuades him to join a demonstration against the Gaddafi regime outside the Libyan embassy in St James's Square, London, in April 1984. Men inside the embassy open fire on the crowd. Both friends are wounded and taken to hospital under police guard, then granted asylum, and Khaled understands that he can neither return nor safely tell his family what has happened to him.

The third friend is Hosam Zowa, a writer whose short story, an allegory of the regime, was read on the BBC Arabic Service; the presenter who read it was later murdered near Regent's Park Mosque by Libyan agents. Khaled had heard the broadcast as a boy in Benghazi, and when he meets Hosam in the 1990s the friendship becomes the center of his life. The novel runs across three decades of that life in London, a schoolteacher's life, measured and careful, and it turns on 2011, when the Arab Spring reaches Libya. Mustafa goes back and joins a militia. Hosam goes back too, falls in love, fights, and ends up disillusioned with what follows the revolution and bound for America. Khaled stays. Matar tells it in Khaled's voice as he walks across London after a farewell, and the long walk holds the whole book.

It is a quiet novel of interiors and conversations, and readers expecting a thriller from that embassy shooting should adjust; Kirkus described "sinuous, Jamesian reserve" and a story that "operates at a relatively low boil." Peter C. Baker in the New York Times called it "a masterly literary meditation on his lifelong themes" and found it easier to follow than Matar's earlier work; Lucy Hughes-Hallett in the Guardian called it "artfully paced." At just over four hundred pages it asks for time and repays it. It suits readers of Sebald and of Matar's own memoir The Return.