Why “My Friends” by Fredrik Backman Will Be One of the Best Books of 2025.

In My Friends, Fredrik Backman crafts a soul-stirring story of friendship, loss, and hope. Find out why it’s a top 2025 read.

Synopsis

The world is full of miracles, but none greater than how far a young person can be carried by someone else’s belief in them.”

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 a wide expanse of sea. But Louisa, soon to be eighteen years old and an aspiring artist herself, knows otherwise. She is determined to find out the story behind these three enigmatic figures.

More than two decades before, 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 every morning, a reason to dream, a reason to love.

Out of that summer emerges a transcendent work of art, a painting that, after a chance encounter in an alleyway, will unexpectedly be placed into Louisa’s care. She embarks on a surprise-filled cross-country journey to discover 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 anxious she becomes about what she’ll find. Louisa’s complicated life is proof that happy endings are sometimes possible, but they don’t always take the form we expect them to.

Fredrik Backman’s signature charm, humor, and attention to the poignant details of everyday life are on full display in this funny, moving novel. His most heartfelt and personal tale yet, My Friends is a stunning testament to the transformative, timeless power of art and friendship.

Audiobook review

ALL THE STARS!

This book will be on my top five of 2025. It’s a masterpiece!

And the translator Neil Smith must be praised as he did a fantastic job!

The plot in a nutshell:

Louisa has lost her best friend, Fish. They both grew up in the foster system. Deep in mourning, Louisa sneaks to an art exhibition to see THE painting she has always dreamt of. She ends up running away from the security guards and having a chance encounter that will change her life!

Soon she will go on a train and follow Ted towards his childhood hometown while he will tell the tale of his best friends and their best summer when they were nearly fifteen.

Shifting between flashes of Louisa’s harsh life and Ted’s childhood, the train travel takes us on a deeply emotional journey through the best and the worst of what mankind has to offer.

I FELT EVERYTHING! It was overwhelming and beautiful. Terrible and superb.

I think all that I wrote in Beartown about Fredrik Backman’s penmanship and what he makes me feel is true for “My Friends”.

When I wrote: “In concise, nude but terrifyingly efficient sentences Frederick Backman immerse the reader in different characters lives.”,  that’s exactly what happened here!

And when I stated that :” This is a story about human nature. About friendships forged unexpectedly sometimes.” , this is also “My Friends” at heart!

I can’t give too many details, even about the characters because Fredrik Backman has some surprises for you. Something I didn’t expect but know that these friends were thick as thieves. They lived intensely, enjoying every moment of their childhood as they knew some of them wouldn’t grow old. In their town of squalor, life was short and brutal. Family abuse was common and you had to be strong to be “a real man”.

It is extremely difficult to explain how Fredrik Backman writes his characters so vividly that you can’t tell what is real and what is fictional. If you had told me that Ted, Joar, Louisa and company lived just two streets over mine I would have believed you. If you had told me that I went to school with them, that I used to swim in the sea with them I would have agreed with you. Because I WANTED them to be true.

And saying that :” with an acute writing he weaves a tale of friendships, fights to survive, to thrive in a hostile environment. Humanity at its best and lowest. He swept me off my feet and made me walk for two days in the shoes of these extraordinarily ordinary but exceptional characters.” , again that’s exactly what happened here.

“My Friends” is a story about friendship but also about grieving the loss of people we loved most.

“Because it’s been a painfully short life, the blink of an eye, a single summer’s day. Ted’s chest hurts, like crying without oxygen, because grief does so many strange things to people, and one of those things is that we forget how to breathe. As if the body’s first instinct is to grieve itself to death. Soon Ted will stand up and discover that he’s forgotten how to walk too, that happens to us all when the love of our life falls asleep for the last time, because when the soul leaves the body, evidently the last thing it does is tie our shoelaces together. In the weeks following the death we trip over thin air. It’s the soul’s fault. »

But My Friends is also a life celebration. A reminder that you have to live every moment as if it was your last. “That’s all of life. All we can hope for. You mustn’t think about the fact that it might end, because then you live like a coward, you never love too much or sing too loudly. You have to take it for granted, the artist thinks, the whole thing: sunrises and slow Sunday mornings and water balloons and another person’s breath against your neck. That’s the only courageous thing a person can do. »

There is so much beauty, joy, despair, grief, sadness and hope in that story that it’s transformative. Just do me a favor and read it. And then gift that book to friends and family. Because that’s just what I will do.

Thanks for reading.

Sophie