What an absolute delight to read another Fredrik Backman novel, MY FRIENDS (Simon and Schuster 2025). Backman writes with such grace, humour, wisdom, curiosity, tenderness and vulnerability; his characters are flawed, haunting, outlandish, eccentric, unique and thoroughly memorable. If you haven’t yet seen his 4-minute speech on writing and anxiety, please click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSuSyZ92Cjg – you will thank me later.
MY FRIENDS is a standalone novel brimming with Backman’s trademark wit, empathy and optimism. At the centre of the story is a painting by a (now famous) artist – 25 years ago, when this was his first painting, an equivalent of a debut novel – he was an unknown teenager prompted to enter a competition by his three friends. The painting is ostensibly of the sea (as its title ‘The One of the Sea’) suggests, but to one of ‘the ones’ (the artist’s nickname for those gifted with original visual talent), it is all about the three tiny figures poised at the end of the pier, barely visible but thrumming with an incredible energy.
Twenty-five years later, the painting is up for sale, and quirky, homeless, entrepreneurial, outspoken and artistic adolescent Louisa (also ‘one of us’) is determined to get a glimpse of it in real life at the auction exhibition, after carrying around a postcard of the picture as a talisman for most of her life.
But a strange and defining incident (inevitably involving the law) sees Louisa caught up in a tense situation and an unexpected life-changing encounter. She embarks on a mission to uncover the secret history and backstory behind the enigmatic figures on the pier, and the artist himself.
The novel swings between the present and 25 years ago, when the group of four friends find refuge from various hellish home scenarios by bonding, swimming, laughing and telling stories out on the pier. One of them, the artist, has a wonderful artistic gift that his friends encourage as his ticket out of banality and into a life of wealth and fame, but at the time he is simply an unhappy teenager who hoards sleeping pills. His friend Joar is outspoken, rough, judgemental and feisty, and never backs down from a fight, especially to protect his friends or members of his family. Ted is a quiet and subdued figure, mourning his father while his mother provides a sanctuary for the friends when they are not at the pier. And Ali is used to instability and uncertainty, never knowing when her family will pick up and move on. They are four adolescents full of angst, anger, hurt, betrayal and sorrow, four lost souls who band together and find strength in each other and their dreams.
A quarter of a century later, teenage Louisa receives the painting in an unexpected and inexplicable bequest and decides she must cross the country to learn the story of its creation, its artist, and its subject – those children on the pier. That knowledge is, she feels sure, bound up in her own ambition to be a painter of great talent.
MY FRIENDS traverses friendship, betrayal, forgiveness, ambition, persistence, determination, courage, heartbreak, violence, the making and meaning of art, the making and breaking of unusual relationships, and the idea that ‘happy endings don’t always take the form we expect’. I love this quote: ‘It might sound like an unhappy ending, but only if you forget how many times during this story we’ve told you that someone laughed. How many really good nows is that? How many people ever have more?’
Backman is the author to read if you want heartwarming, confronting, poignant, sage and layered stories, and MY FRIENDS is the book you will carry around with you, desperate to read what happens on the next page. The characters are unforgettable and the circularity, wisdom, humour and lessons of the story will stay with you.