My Friends: A Novel by Fredrik Backman Review: A Tender, Dual-Timeline Celebration of Friendship

My Friends centres on two intertwined storylines separated by roughly twenty-five years. In the past, four teenage friends — Joar, Ted, Ali, and a fourth who becomes a painter — form a bond of extraordinary closeness. That friendship produces a work of art: a painting depicting three tiny figures sitting at the end of a long pier, so intimate and precise that it becomes one of the most famous images of its kind. In the present, a young woman named Louisa encounters that painting and finds her life altered by it. Chapters alternate between the two timelines, with the past belonging to the four teenagers and the present belonging to Louisa — a structure designed, according to Chicago Review of Books contributor Karen Bellovich, to explore what it means to know another person so completely that the bond itself becomes a creative act capable of outlasting its makers.

Backman, the Swedish author best known for A Man Called Ove and Anxious People, wrote My Friends originally in Swedish, but in a notable reversal the English-language edition — published by Atria Books on May 6, 2025 — preceded the Swedish edition from Norstedts, which followed in August 2025. Backman has spoken candidly about the book's personal weight: in an interview with USA Today, he indicated that My Friends may be the last novel he publishes, lending the project an uncommon sense of stakes and finality. The novel was also named a May Indie Next List Top Pick by the American Booksellers Association, signalling strong early enthusiasm from independent booksellers ahead of publication.

The novel's reception has been emphatic. It spent twelve weeks on the New York Times Best Seller List and reached number one on August 17, 2025. It won the 2025 Goodreads Choice Award for Best Fiction and was shortlisted for a British Book Award for Fiction Book of the Year. The audiobook won the Libby Audiobook of the Year and received an Audie Award nomination for Fiction. BookPage awarded the novel a starred review, with the publication writing that Backman, "by focusing his tremendous empathy on the power of art and friendship, has created a novel that celebrates the beauty of being alive." Critical coverage* added, in a starred assessment, that "Backman delivers a wistful story about the power of friendships.... The author is at the top of his game." The novel also appeared on year-end lists from USA Today, critical coverage, Marie Claire, and Real Simple, among others.

The thematic landscape of My Friends is consistent with Backman's body of work — loss, grief, the complications of love, and the possibility of second chances — but the novel trains its lens specifically on friendship as a generative force rather than merely a comfort. According to the Chicago Review of Books, the book takes an in-depth look at what it means to be so close to another person that the knowledge you carry of them becomes something almost artistic in itself. Bellovich describes it as "a tender heartwarming novel exploring the challenges and joys of life itself, of loving and trusting others, of unexpected change and unexpected hope." Alongside that warmth, the novel is also described by its publisher as "unforgettably funny" — a blend of levity and emotional depth that characterises Backman's most celebrated work.

Readers who responded to the community-and-grief dynamics of Anxious People or A Man Called Ove are the natural audience, but the dual-timeline architecture and the centrality of visual art as a narrative device give My Friends a distinct shape. Those drawn to stories where an object — here, a painting — serves as the hinge between generations and strangers will find the premise particularly well-suited to their tastes. Readers who prefer more plot-driven fiction, or who find Backman's characteristic blend of sentiment and comedy uneven, may find the novel's deliberately ruminative pace a challenge; some readers, as noted in broader commentary on Backman's work, respond differently to his emotional register depending on how much they connect with his style of warmth. At 448 pages, the novel is substantial, and its dual-timeline construction asks readers to hold both strands in patient suspension before they converge.