My Friends

Eighteen-year-old Louisa is adrift — a prickly, fiercely intelligent aspiring artist raised in foster care, with more talent than luck. When she encounters one of the most famous paintings in the world, she notices what almost no one else does: three tiny figures sitting at the far end of a long pier, in a corner most viewers mistake for empty sea. Convinced there is a story hidden in those brushstrokes, she sets out to learn who they were.

Twenty-five years earlier, four teenagers — bound by fierce loyalty and each escaping a difficult home — spend one transformative summer on that very pier. What passes between them in those months will echo across decades, shaping lives long after the summer ends and finding its way, eventually, onto canvas.

Fredrik Backman's My Friends braids these two timelines into a warm, aching meditation on friendship, art, grief, and the way the people who see us young can save us. Tender and funny in Backman's unmistakable voice, it is a novel about how the smallest, most private moments can become the things that outlast us.