F
Fredrik Backman
Fredrik Backman is the author of A Man Called Ove and The Scandal. He writes heartwarming and often humorous stories about ordinary people facing life's challenges.
My Friends
Synopsis
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.
Genres
Characters
Louisa (My Friends)Protagonist
An eighteen-year-old aspiring artist raised in violent foster homes, who becomes fixated on the three figures at the end of the pier in a famous painting and sets out to learn their story.
C. JatProtagonist
The fourth friend, who painted "The One of the Sea" at fourteen; in the present timeline he is a terminally ill thirty-nine-year-old artist of world renown.
JoarSupporting
The smallest of the four friends and the most combative, quick to fight for the others.
Ted (My Friends)Supporting
The shy, timid one of the four friends and the only one with a stable home; twenty-five years later the dying artist asks him to seek Louisa out.
Ali (My Friends)Supporting
The only girl among the four friends on the pier — fearless, loving and determined.
Audie Award (2026)British Book Award (2026)Goodreads Choice Award (2025)Goodreads Choice Award for Fiction (2025)Libby Award (2026)RUSA CODES Reading List (2026)She Reads Best of Award (2025)
Frequently asked questions
Is My Friends part of a series, or do I need to read Fredrik Backman's other books first?
My Friends is a standalone novel. It shares no characters or setting with Backman's Beartown trilogy (Beartown, Us Against You, The Winners) or with A Man Called Ove, so it can be read on its own with no prior reading.
Was My Friends originally written in Swedish, and who translated it?
Yes — Fredrik Backman wrote it in Swedish as Mina vänner. Unusually, the English translation by Neil Smith appeared first, published by Atria Books on 6 May 2025, with the Swedish edition following from Norstedts on 28 August 2025. Neil Smith has also translated Beartown and Anxious People.
Has My Friends won any awards?
It won the 2025 Goodreads Choice Award for Fiction, taking over 167,000 votes, and its audiobook won the Libby Book Award for Audiobook of the Year. It was also shortlisted for the British Book Award for Fiction Book of the Year and nominated for an Audie Award for Fiction, and it reached number one on the New York Times bestseller list in August 2025.