My Friends by Hisham Matar audiobook review – life in exile

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.

Matar, the son of a political dissident who was also exiled from Libya, narrates his own book, and his reading is bathed in melancholy as Khaled mourns the life and the country he has lost. Most affecting are his reflections on what it is to be separated from loved ones. “It turns out it is possible to live without one’s family. All one has to do is endure each day and gradually, minute by minute, brick by brick, time builds a wall.”

Further listening

Berserker! An Autobiography
Adrian Edmondson , Macmillan, 11hr 50min
The comic and actor looks back on his life, from his strict Methodist upbringing to the anarchic comedy of Comic Strip, The Young Ones and beyond. Read by the author.

Homecoming
Kate Morton , Bolinda Audio, 17hr 38min
The Crown actor Claire Foy narrates Morton’s multigenerational tale in which Jess, a struggling journalist, decides to investigates the unsolved case of a body found beside a creek in Adelaide, Australia, in 1959.