Fredrik Backman - My Friends, 2026

Number of Pages: 436

Categories:
Contemporary romance, Contemporary Fiction

Backman works in a broader emotional register here, turning a famous painting and a vanished summer into a meditation on survival, loyalty and being seen. The novel feels expansive but intimate, funny in flashes and deeply attuned to the marks friendship leaves long after youth has ended.

Ideal for readers who:
Love emotional literary fiction built around art and memory
Enjoy found-family stories shaped by adolescence and long aftermaths
Are drawn to seaside settings, road journeys and layered timelines
Want a moving novel with warmth as well as sorrow
My Friends begins with a painting and the tiny, nearly unnoticed figures on an abandoned pier that only Louisa seems to understand. Fredrik Backman then folds the story backwards into a summer in a seaside town, where four teenagers create a bond strong enough to outlast the hardest parts of their lives.

The novel balances tenderness, humour and grief with real assurance. Readers who respond to stories about art, inheritance and the ways friendship can remake a future will find this especially rewarding.