Hisham Matar & Priscilla Morris

Hisham Matar’s new novel My Friends is a masterful, intensely moving novel about three friends living in political exile and the emotional homeland that deep friendships can provide. Khaled and Mustafa meet at university in Edinburgh: two Libyan eighteen-year-olds expecting to return home after their studies. In a moment of recklessness and courage, they travel to London to join a demonstration in front of the Libyan embassy. When government officials open fire on protestors in broad daylight, both friends are wounded, and their lives forever changed. Over the years that follow, Khaled, Mustafa and their friend Hosam, a writer, are bound together by their shared history. If friendship is a space to inhabit, theirs becomes small and inhospitable when a revolution in Libya forces them to choose between the lives they have created in London and the lives they left behind.

‘My Friends is a brilliant novel about innocence and experience, about friendship, family and exile. It makes clear, once more, that Hisham Matar is a supremely talented novelist.’ Colm Tóibín

Priscilla Morris’ Women’s Prize-shortlisted novel Black Butterflies is set in Sarajevo in the spring of 1992, where each night, nationalist gangs erect barricades, splitting the diverse city into ethnic enclaves and each morning, the residents — whether Muslim, Croat or Serb – push the makeshift barriers aside. When violence finally spills over, Zora, an artist and teacher, sends her husband and elderly mother to safety with her daughter in England. Reluctant to believe that hostilities will last more than a handful of weeks, she stays behind while the city falls under siege. As the assault deepens and everything they love is laid to waste, black ashes floating over the rooftops, Zora and her friends are forced to rebuild themselves, over and over. Theirs is a breathtaking story of disintegration, resilience and hope.

‘[Black Butterflies is…] A moving, compelling, deeply human novel about love and hope in a city under siege.’ Emma Stonex, bestselling author of The Lamplighters