Bookended by protest and revolution, immigration and exile, a short story and the death of a dictator, is the life of one man and his two friends.
Khaled moves to the UK as a teenager in the early 1980s to study, leaving behind Qaddafi's increasingly totalitarian Libya. In Edinburgh he meets fellow Libyan Mustafa, and the two strike up an immediate friendship bound by their isolation, academia and fear of their fellow students. Anyone at any time could be a spy.
On an impulse, the pair travel to a protest in front of the Libyan embassy in London, where the men are shot, an event that prevents them from ever returning to their home land, to their families, forever marking them as exiles in a foreign country and demarcating the trajectory of both men's lives. As he ages, Khaled ponders on the meaning of home and as he and Mustafa contemplate what a return to Libya might mean, Qaddafi 's strong hold tightens.
On a trip to Paris, Khaled meets Hosam, a writer also in exile, whose short story, read out over BBC radio sparked a desire to study literature in a young Khaled, and would eventually bring him to the west.
Throughout the 1990s and into the Arab Spring, the three very different men, one a writer, one a teacher, one a revolutionary, navigate friendship in London, and as the Arab Spring sparks revolution back home, each must make a decision about his future.
My Friends is an ode to friendship, filial love, home and kinship of all kinds. It is a deeply moving and gorgeously written story, one for the ages.
