Shortlisted for both the Man Booker Prize and the Guardian First Book Award, and published here as a Penguin Essential for the first time.

Nine-year-old Suleiman is just awakening to the wider world beyond the games on the hot pavement outside his home and beyond the loving embrace of his parents. He becomes the man of the house when his father goes away on business, but then he sees his father, standing in the market square in a pair of dark glasses. Suddenly the wider world becomes a frightening place where parents lie and questions go unanswered. Suleiman turns to his mother, who, under the cover of night, entrusts him with the secret story of her childhood.

Hisham Matar's new novel My Friends is available for pre-order now!

Nine-year-old Suleiman is just an ordinary boy living in an ordinary house with ordinary parents. Or so he thinks. Then one day when his father is away on business - as he is regularly - Suleiman sees his father standing in the market square wearing sun glasses, and suddenly the safe ordered world he thought he knew is shattered.


About the Author
Hisham 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 Award, the Rathbones Folio Prize, the Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize, Frances 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 the novels In the Country of Men, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and Anatomy of a Disappearance, and his most recent book is A Month in Siena. 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 thirty languages.

Awards
Winner of Commonwealth Writers Prize. Short-listed for Man Booker Prize for Fiction.



Book Information
ISBN 9780241973622
Author Hisham Matar
Format Paperback
Page Count 256
Imprint Penguin Books Ltd
Publisher Penguin Books Ltd
Weight(grams) 142g
Dimensions(mm) 181mm * 111mm * 16mm