Author(s): Hisham Matar

Fiction | 2024 01 Jan New Release

By the Pulitzer prize-winning author of The Return comes an astonishing new novel about friendship, set between London and Libya in the 1980s and the present

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. Government officials open fire, killing a policewoman and wounding eleven Libyan demonstrators. Both friends are critically injured and their lives are 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.

STAFF REVIEW

A quietly devastating novel about the pain of exile, the violence of the Qaddafi regime and, above all else, the power and beauty of friendships—how they can be an 'emotional country' unto their own when one is far from home.

Matar is truly masterful here. Read it!

—Eliza from Brunswick Street Bookstore