Title: My Friends
Author: Frederik Backman
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Publication date: May 5, 2025
ISBN: 9781982121655
Synopsis:
Most people don’t even notice them—three tiny figures sitting at the end of a long pier in the corner of one of the most famous paintings in the world. Most people think it’s just a depiction of the sea. But Louisa, an aspiring artist herself, knows otherwise, and she is determined to find out the story of these three enigmatic figures.
Twenty-five years earlier, in a distant seaside town, a group of teenagers find refuge from their bruising home lives by spending long summer days on an abandoned pier, telling silly jokes, sharing secrets, and committing small acts of rebellion. These lost souls find in each other a reason to get up each morning, a reason to dream, a reason to love.
Out of that summer emerges a transcendent work of art, a painting that will unexpectedly be placed into eighteen-year-old Louisa’s care. She embarks on a surprise-filled cross-country journey to learn how the painting came to be and to decide what to do with it. The closer she gets to the painting’s birthplace, the more nervous she becomes about what she’ll find. Louisa is proof that happy endings don’t always take the form we expect in this stunning testament to the transformative, timeless power of friendship and art.
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This is my first encounter with Backman as an author, and I am COMPLETELY hooked. This was the first book of 2026 selected for my book club and I really wasn’t sure what to expect. Sure, I’d seen Backman’s books on the shelves at the bookstore and they always had a pretty aesthetic, but they’d never jumped out enough for me to grab a copy (I’m notoriously driven to pick books up with unique or beautiful covers which is not always a good indicator). I am, however, eternally grateful, that this book came up as a book club selection; I now feel like a whole new world has been opened up to me, knowing that Backman has a whole repertoire of other novels that I can now experience for the first time.
My Friends is an absolutely breathtaking study of human connection of friendship and love, found family, grief, creativity, survival, and hope. The characters are drawn together through a deep and immediate sense of belonging and shared experience, each surviving their own traumas and difficulties, then finding safety and a sense of home with one another. Together, the friends can do anything. The are known and accepted for who they are. Whether in the past or present, there is a common thread that pulls the characters into one another’s orbit, binding them together as “one of us.” It’s impossible not to love each and every character, so perfectly realistic and flawed, and so magnetic in their humanity.
The narrator’s tone is witty, playful, yet full of levity and understanding, knowing these characters intimately and displaying knowledge of how characters would react, even before they do, as if the narrator, too, is an integral part of the group. I read the English translation, and what’s remarkable is that this book is that such a well-crafted voice is captured so perfectly, transcending this book from ordinary novel into masterpiece. On a dime, the story had me oscillating from laughing to crying, often both at the same time, evoking deep and visceral emotions from deep within me. In one breath, the story leads the reader on a journey from the most terrible violence families can commit against one another to the greatest joys of friendship, a rollercoaster of the highs and lows of human lives observed in parallel.
It’s a commentary on class, on the meaning of family and friendship, on loss and grief. Backman observes through the lens of those who live without affluence or easy access to education or resources. They are considered misfits and are often looked down on or pitied by others. Yet, it is with this group that the most thoughtful and provocative artwork emerges, changing the world by sharing the most raw and evocative imagery.
My Friends has very quicky become one of my favourite books. It’s beautiful, breathtaking, and so very, very real.
Happy reading!
Worn Pages and Ink 