A meditative tale of friendship, identity and separation, the Libyan-American writer Hisham Matar’s Booker-longlisted My Friends begins with Hosam and Khaled drinking coffee and then parting ways at St Pancras station in London. Khaled, our narrator, is a schoolteacher who lives in Shepherd’s Bush, while Hosam, a writer, is leaving the capital to make a new life in America. As Khaled walks back home after seeing his friend on to the train, he reflects on his life in exile.
In 1984, Khaled, then a student in Edinburgh, had travelled down to London with a classmate, Mustafa, where they joined the protest against the Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi outside the Libyan embassy. Shots were fired from inside the building, killing a young police officer, Yvonne Fletcher. Khaled also sustained a gunshot wound and, though he made a quick recovery, was left “forever a marked man”. Knowing it would be too dangerous to return to his family in Benghazi, he applied for asylum in Britain and set about building a life for himself far from home.
