My Friends by Fredrik Backman

My Friends by Fredrik Backman

448 pages

Published May 2025 by Atria Books

Publisher's Summary: 

Most people don’t even notice them—three tiny figures sitting at the end of a long pier in the corner of one of the most famous paintings in the world. Most people think it’s just a depiction of the sea. But Louisa, an aspiring artist herself, knows otherwise, and she is determined to find out the story of these three enigmatic figures.

Twenty-five years earlier, in a distant seaside town, a group of teenagers find refuge from their bruising home lives by spending long summer days on an abandoned pier, telling silly jokes, sharing secrets, and committing 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 eighteen-year-old Louisa’s care. She embarks on a surprise-filled cross-country journey to learn how the painting came to be and to decide what to do with it. The closer she gets to the painting’s birthplace, the more nervous she becomes about what she’ll find. Louisa is proof that happy endings don’t always take the form we expect in this stunning testament to the transformative, timeless power of friendship and art.

My Thoughts: 

I've been going back and forth on this one. On the one hand, it is very much what readers expect from Backman. On the other hand, it's a very different story from his usual stories. I've seen some readers say that it's their favorite of his books. For me, it's not, which is not to say it's not a very good book that will give Backman fans much of what they want from his books. 

Like Backman's other books, My Friends deals with loss, grief, friendship, and the ways life can be hard and complicated at times. While this book has plenty of Backman's usual humor, it felt to me that it was more weighed down by life's difficulties than his other books. 

The book is told from two time periods and two points of view through most of the book. In present time, we are following Louisa who has led a really tough life, including the recent death of her only friend. Her only solace is a postcard of a famous painting, a painting she finally gets to see in person. In the past, we follow four friends, who live equally difficult lives, as they live their final summer together, the summer that resulted in that famous painting. Their only real joy is the time they spend together, time that ends each evening with the word "Tomorrow," a promise to each other. 

Louisa's life becomes intertwined with one of the friends and as the two of them travel across the country, the friend tells Louisa the story of that summer. Finally we come to the town the friends grew up in and Louisa is given the chance to restart her life, with new friends and opportunities she never would have had without that postcard.