#8 in Literary fiction
My Friends
- 436
- Pages
- about 8 h
- Reading time
- NYT bestseller · 14 weeks on the list, peaked at #1
Affiliate link: buying through it supports BookRank at no extra cost to you.
Our view
“My Friends” is a warm, funny and openly sad novel about what friendship can carry and what art is for. Fredrik Backman frames it as a story inside a story: a young artist traces a famous painting back to a group of teenagers on a pier twenty-five years earlier. Abuse and death are part of it, met with humour, and the book means to move its reader.
The view of the BookRank editors, written from readers’ ratings and comments. It does not affect the score or the book’s place in a ranking.
About the book
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.
Where the score comes from
The sources average 8.5 across 345 ratings — not yet many, so the reader vote carries 70% of the weight and the rest pulls toward the Literary fiction average of 8.1. That is how 8.4 comes out.
| Source | Average | Ratings | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hardcover | 8.5 | 345 | 100% |
Frequently asked
How long is My Friends?
It has 436 pages — longer than 65% of the ranked books in Literary fiction.
In this book
Themes this book shares with others — each leads to the best books on it.
If you liked this
Same shelf — Literary fiction — with scores between 8.2 and 8.5, closest to this book.
