My friends
By Fredrik Backman
Blurb
The beautiful new novel that will make you laugh and cry, from the global bestselling author of Anxious People and A Man Called Ove. Fredrik Backman returns with an unforgettably funny, deeply moving tale of four teenagers whose friendship creates a bond so powerful that it changes a complete stranger’s life twenty-five years later…
‘A stunning, sweeping, extraordinary story of connection, love, and the unbreakable bonds that guide and shape us. Full of humour and heart, My Friends is simply wonderful’ Chris Whitaker
* AN INSTANT SUNDAY TIMES AND NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER *
* ONE OF GOODREADS READERS' MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2025 *
* A BARNES AND NOBLE NATIONAL BOOK CLUB PICK *
You have to take life for granted, the artist thinks, the whole thing: sunrises and slow Sunday mornings and
water balloons and another person’s breath against your neck. That’s the only courageous thing a person can do.
In the corner of one of the most famous paintings in the world three tiny figures sit at the end of a pier. Most people don’t even notice them. Most people think it’s just a depiction of the sea. But Louisa, an aspiring artist herself, knows otherwise.
Twenty-five years earlier, in a distant seaside town, a group of teenagers seek refuge from their bruising home lives by spending long summer days together. They tell jokes, they share secrets, and they commit 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 18-year-old Louisa’s care. Determined to learn how it came to be and to decide what to do with it, Louisa embarks on a cross-country journey. But the closer she gets to the painting’s birthplace, the more nervous she becomes.
In this stunning testament to the transformative, timeless power of friendship and art, Louisa is proof that happy endings don’t always take the form we expect.
Our Review
“Louisa is a teenager, the best kind of human. The evidence for this is very simple: little children think teenagers are the best humans, and teenagers think teenagers are the best humans, the only people who don’t think that humans are the best humans are adults. Which is obviously adults are the worst kind of humans.”
I preordered My Friends by Fredrik Backman because I love the way he writes, his character driven plots just suck you in and when they spit you out there is no doubt you will be an emotional wreck. My Friends was no different.
The book focuses on a young girl named Louisa and a painting she loves, it also focuses on the artist of the painting and one summer he lived 25 years earlier, the summer he painted the picture.
When we first meet Louisa, she is at an auction for a very famous, very expensive painting, a painting everyone keeps saying is about the sea, but Louisa knows better.
Louisa is reeling from the loss of her best friend, Fish’. Fish was the one who taught her how to break into places, a skill she used to break into the auction. Fish was slightly older than her and had to leave the foster home where they met.
“Adults always think they can protect children by stopping them from going to dangerous places, but every teenager knows that’s pointless, because the most dangerous place on earth is inside us.”
Louisa was 5 when was abandoned at her neighbours house by her mum, her mum never came back. She moved to a series of foster homes until in one she found some postcards of famous paintings and one of those paintings was the painting of the sea.
“Imagination is a child’s only weapon. And on the back of the postcard of the painting, Louisa wrote a message, the one she would have wanted if she had been longed for and loved: See you soon. – Mom.”
Lousia loved the painting because of the tiny detail that most people fail to see when they look at the painting. The picture is not just a picture of the sea; it is a picture of three teenage boys sitting on the end of a pier.
“They’re painted as if the artist saw them so intensively and drawed them so beautifully that he learned how to whisper in colour. Painted by someone who must have been completely beaten to pieces inside, because no one could hold a brush so carefully otherwise, no one could paint a friendship like this without first having been a completely lonely child.”
After the auction a chance encounter with the artist changes Louisa’s life forever.
The artist was only 14 when he painted the picture. The sun was shining, and a group of teenagers were sat on the end of a pier laughing.
“If you’ve had people who can make you laugh like that, you never forget it. If not, words are pointless.”
My Friends is a rare book because it handles both timelines beautifully. The stories are seamless and both parts work together so well that asking me to choose a favourite would be like asking a mother to choose her favourite child.
All of the characters in the book were incredible, and all of them had been written off as misfits, nobody, or were in some other way deemed unworthy.
“The kids on the pier weren’t supposed to be born poor and die poor because that is how the world is constructed…. they knew perfectly well they were stupid and worthless because they had been told that the whole way through their childhoods.”
The friendships described in My Friends are epic movie worthy friendships of the kind you see in films like Stand By Me. I lived every moment of the book along with all the characters and there were times when I had to stop reading because I couldn’t see through the tears in my eyes.
I want to keep writing about the different parts of the story and how I felt reading them, but I am aware this is a story that is better experienced. All I have left to say is this book was phenomenal, it broke me repeatedly, but it also healed me repeatedly. There are no words for how much I loved it.
Our Final Rating...
Read & Shared 9 Times.
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