My Friends by Fredrik Backman: A Review

Fredrik Backman built his reputation on a very specific trick: he writes about ordinary, often prickly people, then spends three hundred pages quietly convincing you that their small, unremarkable lives are actually the whole point. "My Friends" is the biggest version of that trick he's attempted yet, and it's the book on our fiction list that generated the most genuine argument on the panel — not about whether it's good, but about how to feel at the end of it.

The novel centers on a painting — the kind of object that shows up in a museum, gets written about, gets studied, and eventually stops feeling like it belonged to anyone in particular. Backman works backward from that painting to the group of teenagers who made it real, and forward to a young woman discovering it decades later, and the book spends most of its length in the space between those two points: how a single summer, a single friendship, can end up mattering to people who were never in the room for it.

My Friends

Fredrik Backman

A multigenerational novel about a painting, the friendship that made it, and the stranger it eventually finds decades later. Backman's warmest, saddest, and most structurally ambitious book to date.

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What Backman Does Better Here Than Usual

If you've read "A Man Called Ove" or "Anxious People," you know Backman's default mode: one very stubborn, very wounded person slowly revealed to be more sympathetic than their behavior suggests. "My Friends" trades that single-character intimacy for something wider — a real ensemble, moving across two timelines, with a structural puzzle (who painted this, and why does it matter now) doing some of the work that character alone usually does in his books. Four of our five fiction-panel readers said this was the first Backman novel where they felt genuinely uncertain how it would end, which is a different kind of tension than his books usually generate.

The tradeoff is pace. Backman's sentimentality needs room to build, and with two timelines sharing the page, "My Friends" takes longer to earn its big emotional swings than "Ove" did. One panelist put down the book twice in the first hundred pages and almost didn't pick it back up — and then texted the group at 1 a.m. after finishing, unprompted, which is the most Backman outcome imaginable.

Who This Book Is For

Readers who love Backman for the ugly-cry ending will get one here, eventually — it just arrives later than in his shorter books, and it's shared across more characters, which some readers found diluted the impact and others found made it land harder. If your favorite thing about his writing is the aphoristic one-liners (the kind of sentence that gets photographed and posted), those are present but less frequent than in "Anxious People." If you go in expecting a slow-burn ensemble novel about how art outlives the people who make it, rather than a character study, you'll have the right expectations.

The Painting as a Structural Device, Not Just a Symbol

What impressed the panel most on a second look wasn't the emotional payoff so much as the mechanics underneath it. Backman uses the painting the way a mystery writer uses a murder weapon — it's the fixed point every timeline has to eventually explain, which means every scene set in the past is quietly answering a question the present-day chapters have already raised. That's a harder trick to pull off than it sounds, because it requires the past timeline to feel like it's building toward something specific rather than just filling in backstory. Two panelists who reread the opening chapters after finishing said details they'd initially read as scene-setting turned out to be doing real structural work — a rare case where a book rewards an immediate reread rather than just inviting one out of nostalgia.

This is also, notably, a book about people who make things — paint them, teach each other to paint them, argue about what a painting is even for — without ever tipping into being a novel about "Art" with a capital A. The craft conversations stay grounded in what these specific, broke, unglamorous teenagers can afford in paint and canvas, which keeps the book's emotional register close to the ground even when its structure is doing something ambitious.

Format Notes: Hardcover, Paperback, or Audiobook

The dual timeline makes this a book where a physical or e-reader format has a real advantage over audio for most readers — it's easy to flip back a chapter to double-check which decade you're in, which is markedly more annoying to do by scrubbing an audiobook. That said, one panelist who listened to the audio edition said the narrator's differentiation between the two timelines' voices was strong enough that she never actually lost her place, so audio isn't a bad choice if that's your preferred format — just budget a little extra attention in the first hundred pages while the two threads are still establishing themselves.

Where This Sits in Backman's Career So Far

It's worth placing this book against Backman's broader catalog rather than judging it purely on its own terms, because readers coming to him fresh via "My Friends" will have a very different experience than longtime readers watching his range expand book by book. His early work — "A Man Called Ove," "My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry" — worked in miniature: one town, one central relationship, tight and controlled. "Anxious People" widened the lens to an ensemble cast trapped in a single location for a single day. "My Friends" is the first time he's stretched an ensemble across decades rather than hours, and the seams of that experiment show occasionally — a secondary character or two gets less interiority than the book's length would suggest they deserve — but the ambition itself is the most interesting thing about where his career is heading. If this is a stepping-stone toward even larger, more structurally daring books, it's a promising one, even with its rough edges.

For readers deciding where to start with Backman entirely, our advice split along expected lines: panelists who wanted the purest, most concentrated version of his emotional style pointed newcomers toward "A Man Called Ove" first. Panelists more interested in seeing what he's capable of right now, ambition and imperfections included, said start here.

If You Want Something Different

Looking for more recent fiction in a similar emotionally-driven register? Our Best Fiction Books of 2026 roundup covers where this ranks against the rest of this year's field. If you'd rather go darker, our Best Thriller and Crime Novels of 2026 list has this year's strongest plot-driven picks instead.

A Few Specific Passages We Kept Returning To

Without spoiling anything, it's worth noting that Backman's strongest chapters here are the ones set at the actual physical site of the painting's creation — a stretch of coastline that functions almost as a sixth character. He returns to the same handful of images across both timelines (a specific quality of the light at a particular hour, the sound the water makes against a particular stretch of rock), and by the third or fourth return, those images have accumulated enough emotional weight that a simple description of the tide can produce a reaction that a lesser writer would need three pages of direct address to earn. That's the specific craft Backman has that keeps his sentimentality from curdling into manipulation for most readers — the feeling is built out of accumulated, concrete detail rather than told to you directly.

Our least convinced panelist, who found the middle third slow, still singled out one of these coastal scenes as the single best-written passage in any Backman novel she's read. That's a useful data point: even readers who struggle with the book's pacing overall tend to agree on where its best writing lives.