Viking snaps up new novel from Pulitzer Prize-winning Matar

Viking has acquired My Friends by Hisham Matar, whose memoir The Return (also Viking) received a Pulitzer Prize in 2017.

Isabel Wall, editorial director, acquired UK and Commonwealth rights in an exclusive submission from Georgia Garrett at Rogers, Coleridge and White. US rights were sold to Andy Ward at Random House and Canadian rights to Nicole Winstanley and David Ross at Penguin Canada by Zoë Pagnamenta at her eponymous agency in New York.

The synopsis for My Friends reads: “Khaled and Mustafa meet at university in Edinburgh: they are two Libyan 18-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.”

Wall commented: “Nobody writes like Hisham Matar. My Friends is the story of three friends suspended between their past and future selves, told with intense emotional and philosophical power. This is an indelible novel about love and friendship pressing against the confining limits of history itself.”

Matar added: “This is a book I have been thinking about since the Arab Spring of 2011. Or so I thought until I recently discovered a note, written on the back of an envelope from 2003, where I had scribbled an idea for a book about friends in exile and the emotional country that certain deep friendships can provide. It is a book about how people end up where they end up, and how often that seems to be determined as much by ideology or politics as by personal temperament. It is a book told across a walk, from St Pancras to Shepherd’s Bush, and therefore as well as being the story of these Libyan exiles, it is also a book about London.”

Matar was born in New York 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 the 2017 Pulitzer Prize, the PEN/Jean Stein Aware, the Rathbones Folio Prize, the Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize, France’s Prix du Livre Etranger Inter & Le Journal du Dimanche and Germany’s Geschwister Scholl Prize, and was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford, the Costa Biography and the National Book Critics Circle Awards.

He is also the author of In the Country of Men – which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize – Anatomy of a Disappearance, and A Month in Siena (all Viking). Matar is a Professor at Barnard College, Columbia University. He 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 over 30 languages.