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Join our monthly contemporary literary book club at Books on the Rise where we read the best new literary fiction and creative non-fiction!

This month we're reading MY FRIENDS by Hisham Matar.

Tickets are £4.99, or free when you buy a copy of the book from Books on the Rise!

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Following three Libyans in London, My Friends is a deeply compassionate and eye-opening novel about exile, the price of freedom and the immeasurable value of human connection from the award-winning author of The Return and A Month in Siena.

Shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction 2024

A masterful, intensely moving novel about three friends living in political exile and the emotional homeland that deep friendships can provide - from the Booker-shortlisted, Pulitzer prize-winning author of The Return.

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.