Book of the Month September 2024

Quizlit’s Book of the Month September 2024 is My Friends by Hisham Matar. Nominated for the 2024 Booker Prize, My Friends is a intensely moving novel about three friends living in political exile and the emotional homeland that deep friendships can provide.

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Book of the Month September 2024

My Friends by Hisham Matar

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, and has the sense that his life has been changed forever. 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 miles 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 into tragedy. In a flash, Khaled finds himself injured, clinging to life, unable to leave Britain, 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 expose them to danger.

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 working at the peak of his powers.

“A masterly literary meditation on [Matar’s] lifelong themes.”—The New York Times

“Dazzling . . . a personal, deeply felt work . . . tightly structured and controlled, looping back and forth through time and memory, building on itself in a process of gradual expansion and revelation.”—Toronto Star

“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.

Other Books by Hisham Matar

The Return

The Return is at once a universal and an intensely personal tale. It is an exquisite meditation on how history and politics can bear down on an individual life. And yet Hisham Matar’s memoir isn’t just about the burden of the past, but the consolation of love, literature and art. It is the story of what it is to be human.

Hisham Matar was nineteen when his father was kidnapped and taken to prison in Libya. He would never see him again. Twenty-two years later, the fall of Gaddafi meant he was finally able to return to his homeland. In this moving memoir, the author takes us on an illuminating journey, both physical and psychological; a journey to find his father and rediscover his country.

In the Country of Men

Nine-year-old Suleiman is just awakening to the wider world beyond the games on the hot pavement outside his home and beyond the loving embrace of his parents. He becomes the man of the house when his father goes away on business, but then he sees his father, standing in the market square in a pair of dark glasses. Suddenly the wider world becomes a frightening place where parents lie and questions go unanswered. Suleiman turns to his mother, who, under the cover of night, entrusts him with the secret story of her childhood.

About the Author

Hisham Matar was born in New York City to Libyan parents, spent his childhood in Tripoli and Cairo, and has lived most of his life in London. His memoir The Return was the recipient of many awards, including the 2017 Pulitzer Prize, the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and the Rathbones Folio Prize. Matar is also the author of the novels In the Country of Men, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and Anatomy of a Disappearance.

Matar is a professor at Barnard College and Columbia University, and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an honorary fellow of the Royal Academy of Arts. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages.

If you enjoyed our Book of the Month September 2024, check out 5 Stunning New Books for September 2024