My Friends
Fredrik Backman's most ambitious novel yet is an ode to friendship, grief, and the art of being human.
I lived with this book for around six months, and there were many moments during that time when I simply wanted it to be over - not out of frustration, but from the sheer emotional weight of it. And yet, when the final page arrived, I could not bring myself to turn it.
At its heart, My Friends is the story of four friends, tracing the full arc of their lives from the sun-soaked freedom of childhood summers to the quieter, harder sufferings of adulthood. It is about families and the complicated love they carry. About dreams nursed in secret and the ways life reshapes them. About grief that never quite announces itself and friendship that stubbornly refuses to let go.
Threading through all of it is art - not as decoration, but as the connective tissue of the entire narrative. “Art is empathy,” Backman writes, and the book itself is proof of that claim.
Like his previous work, the novel moves between timelines, weaving past and present together with a confidence that never feels mechanical. The dual structure is not a gimmick here; it earns its place, because understanding who these people are as adults demands knowing who they were as children.
Backman’s greatest gift has always been his characters, and My Friends is no exception. Each of the four friends is rendered with such specificity. They are funny, flawed and achingly human. They become people you know. People you worry about. That kind of individuality is not an accident; it is the result of a writer who pays attention to the small, unglamorous details of how people actually are.
The prose carries the same quality. Every few pages, Backman lands a line that stops you cold. “The most dangerous place on earth is inside us.” It is the kind of sentence that sounds simple until you sit with it. Just when you think he has reached the limit of what he can do, he quietly raises the bar again. Backman does not merely write - he interrogates. He asks questions the reader did not know they needed to face.
Should You Read It?
If there is one reservation to raise, it is the book’s considerable length. There are stretches where the sheer scale becomes a test of patience. The pace of the narrative is alarmingly slow and that is not easy to wrestle with. But here is the thing: once you are truly inside this world, the length stops being a flaw and becomes a gift. You are not reading a long book. You are spending time with people you love.
This one is not meant to be read. Experience it. Live it.
My Rating
4.5/5
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I might pick it up towards the end of this year otherwise next year for sure.