My Friends A Goodreads' MOST anticipated novel of 2025
Fredrik Backman, the Swedish author behind A Man Called Ove and Anxious People, is back with a novel that has already landed on the New York Times bestseller list and topped Goodreads' most anticipated reads for 2025. If his previous books made you cry on public transport, brace yourself. At the heart of My Friends is a deceptively simple image: three tiny figures, painted at the end of a pier, tucked into the corner of one of the world's most recognised works of art. Most viewers walk straight past them. Louisa, an eighteen-year-old with artistic ambitions of her own, cannot. The story moves between two timelines. In one, a group of teenagers in a coastal town spend a summer finding solace in each other, away from difficult home lives. They share jokes, whispered secrets, and small acts of gentle defiance. Out of that closeness comes something lasting, something painted. In the other timeline, Louisa finds herself the unlikely custodian of that very painting and sets off across the country to understand it, growing more anxious with every mile. Backman writes friendship the way few authors bother to: messy, funny, and quietly devastating. The novel asks what it means to take ordinary life seriously, sunrises, slow mornings, the warmth of someone breathing beside you, and treats that question with genuine tenderness rather than sentimentality. Readers have responded with real feeling. 'I haven't read a friendship story this genuine and emotionally resonant in a very long time,' wrote one. Another simply asked, 'What have I been doing all these years?' High praise, and in this case, it's earned. Chris Whitaker calls it 'simply wonderful', and it's hard to argue. My Friends is warm, wise, and quietly surprising.
- Author: Fredrik Backman
- Publisher: Simon & Schuster
- Genre: Romance
- ISBN: 978-1398516403
- Pages: 448 pages