Our score
Excellent
My Friends
Fredrik Backman's My Friends follows Louisa, eighteen and broke, as she carries a famous painting across the country to find out who the three small figures at the end of its pier really were. Twenty-five years earlier, four teenagers spent a summer on that pier surviving their families. Warm, funny, structurally restless literary fiction from the author of A Man Called Ove.
From the review
Backman writes the way somebody tells you a story at a kitchen table well past midnight, doubling back, breaking off to explain a person you have not met yet, insisting he is getting to the point. For the first hundred pages of My Friends that habit is genuinely disorienting, because the book keeps cutting between Louisa in the present and four teenagers on a pier twenty-five years earlier, and it holds back the connective tissue on purpose. That stretch tests you. I nearly set it down. Then the summer sections start to close around each other, and it becomes clear the withholding was doing work all along. The pier is the best thing in the novel, and Backman barely describes it. What he gives you instead is what it holds. Kids whose homes hurt, sitting in the one place nobody can reach them, repeating jokes until the jokes stop being funny and turn into a private language only the four of them speak. He is exact about the mechanics of teenage loyalty, the way it comes out sideways as insult and inconvenience and simply showing up again the next day. His teenagers swear too much and love too loudly and are embarrassingly recognizable.
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