My Friends

A little about the story

Most admirers of a famous painting notice the sea before the small figures gathered at the end of a pier. Eighteen-year-old Louisa, an aspiring artist, is drawn to those figures instead. Her curiosity leads her toward the story of a group of teenagers who found refuge in one another during a difficult summer twenty-five years earlier. The figures seem almost incidental to the painting’s fame, yet Louisa senses that the friendships behind them matter more than the price attached to the canvas.

Moving between their friendship and Louisa’s search, the novel explores how a work of art can preserve lives that might otherwise go unnoticed. Backman combines youthful rebellion, grief, and comic misadventure in a story about people who give one another room to imagine a future. The journey connects strangers through the traces that friendship leaves behind. The novel treats creativity as something rooted in ordinary acts of attention, asking whose experiences are preserved when a private memory becomes an object everyone wants to possess.

Things You May Not Know About My Friends

• The English edition came first. My Friends appeared in English in 2025 before the Swedish publication of Mina vänner that August, reversing the usual order for Backman’s novels.
• A small detail opens a larger story. Three figures at the end of a pier matter more to Louisa than the painting’s famous seascape, turning attention into the beginning of discovery.
• Two moments in time connect. Louisa’s search is linked to a friendship formed twenty-five years earlier, giving the novel a structure built around the persistence of private experience.
• An artist recognizes other lives. Louisa is eighteen and wants to make art herself, so her interest in the painting is personal as well as a search for its history.
• A reader-voted fiction winner. The book won the 2025 Goodreads Choice Award for Fiction, adding a large reader-selected award to its reception as a standalone novel.