Hisham Matar talks about his new novel My Friends.

The new novel by Hisham Matar, bestselling author of The Return, sheds a nuanced light on a political issue that has been much in the news: the Arab Spring and the uprising against Gaddafi in Libya. In My Friends, we follow Khaled, a Libyan living in London. In 1984, when he and his friend Mustafa join the demonstration against Muammar Gaddafi at the Libyan embassy in London as young men, they cannot yet foresee the consequences of that act. Gaddafi orders the People's Bureau to open fire on the crowd, injuring 11 people and killing a young policewoman.

Over the following years, the friendship between Khaled, Mustafa and their friend Hosam, a writer, deepens more and more, connected as they feel by their shared history. More than 30 years later, a revolution in Libya forces them to make a choice between the life they created for themselves and the one they left behind.
In this deeply moving and nuanced novel, set in London, Benghazi and Paris, award-winning novelist Hisham Matar explores the power of friendship and the devastating effects of violence, and reduces events on the world stage to human proportions.

Hisham Matar (b. 1970) was born in New York, where his father was a diplomat for Libya. He grew up in Tripoli, Cairo and Paris, and has lived in London since 1986. His debut novel In the Country of Men was nominated for the Man Booker Prize in 2006. He subsequently published the acclaimed Anatomy of a Disappearance and The Return, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize. Matar is an activist against totalitarian regimes in the Middle East and is known for his thought-provoking opinion pieces.