Hisham Matar, 53, was born in New York to Libyan parents and raised in Tripoli, Cairo and London, the place he has lived most since his mid-teens. His two previous novels, In the Country of Men (shortlisted for the 2006 Booker) and Anatomy of a Disappearance, are both narrated by boys whose father is abducted – an experience that is the basis of Matar’s Pulitzer-winning memoir The Return (2016), about the political imprisonment and probable murder of his own father, who opposed Muammar Gaddafi. In Matar’s new book, My Friends, a Libyan exile takes a walk across London while talking us through his youth and middle age, from his 80s student days to Gaddafi’s fall in 2011. For Colombian author Juan Gabriel Vásquez, it’s Matar’s “most political novel, but also an intimate meditation on friendship and love and everything in between”.

How did My Friends begin?
Unusually slowly. Years ago, when I was in Paris writing In the Country of Men, I wrote on the back of an envelope a very simple two-line idea for a book about three male friends who end up in different places. I started thinking about it more in 2011 and 2012 when I was surrounded by friends who were very involved in the Arab spring, not only in Libya but in Egypt and Tunisia. It was revealing to me to see that how we behave in such situations may have less to do with political conviction than with personal temperament. I wanted to explore that idea in a novel but I needed time and [emotional] distance [from those events]; back then I couldn’t have written a scene like the one the book has about the killing of Gaddafi.

Had you intended to write a longer novel than usual?
No, I’ve always tried to write short books – I don’t like long books – but the scale of this one is different: 30-plus years, told across a two-hour walk. It gave me serious trouble but I worked as an architect for the first seven years of my professional life and one thing I learned was to put your drawings up on the wall if you’re stuck. I still do that with my writing. Normally it’s early on; with this, I was midway. I had 250 pages along the walls, down the corridor, into the bathroom, everywhere.