.The following version was used to create this guide: Backman, Fredrik. My Friends. A Novel: Simon & Schuster, 2025.

My Friends: A Novel follows Louisa, an eighteen-year-old girl who has grown up in foster care. Louisa is convinced that adults are “the worst kind of humans” and that people like her do not get happy endings (7). At the start, she breaks into an art auction to vandalize The One of the Sea, a famous painting by the reclusive artist C. Jat. The rich guests talk about art only as investment, hoping the artist will die so the painting will become more valuable. For Louisa, this work is sacred. She first saw it on a postcard in foster care and shared it with her chaotic, beloved friend Fish, who later died of addiction. Standing before the painting, Louisa sees what adults who see only a landscape miss. The painting is a pier with friends at the edge of the world, laughing like they know they are doomed.

Her attempt to tag the painting turns into a disaster. Though security drags her out, she defends herself with a pen and spray paint and escapes into an alley where she meets a homeless man and his cat. She paints on the wall with him. From the skulls he adds on the wall, she realizes that he is C. Jat himself, meaning Kimkim, the artist who painted The One of the Sea twenty-five years earlier. He is dying and oddly peaceful about it. They share a brief, intense connection before guards and police close in. He tells her to run and calls her “one of us.” Later, after being arrested, he makes one last request to his old friend Ted to find Louisa and give her the painting she loves (30).

Kimkim dies that night. Louisa is shattered when she hears the news on the radio in the back seat of a stranger’s car. She drifts back to the alley and spends the night painting in grief. At dawn, Ted finds her there. Awkward, anxious, and furious with the world, he is carrying Kimkim’s ashes, suitcase, and a large box. When Louisa opens it, she discovers the original One of the Sea. Ted explains that Kimkim sold everything to buy back this painting at the auction specifically so he could give it away—to someone who saw it as he did.

Overwhelmed, Louisa insists she cannot keep it; Ted insists he cannot take care of her. However, when she threatens to find dangerous strangers to help her sell it, Ted’s protective instincts win. He grudgingly lets her accompany him on a train journey to Kimkim’s hometown by the sea, where he intends to bury the ashes. On the train, between arguments and jokes, Ted begins telling her the story behind the painting which was painted the last summer of his own adolescence.

Twenty-five years earlier, Ted was a timid boy in a harbor town. His best friends were Joar, (a volatile, funny kid with an abusive father), Kimkim (a painfully sensitive artist), and Ali (a wild, fearless girl). The four of them survived poverty, violence, and loneliness through reckless adventures and small acts of rebellion. Joar discovered an art competition for children and decided it would be Kimkim’s ticket out of town. He sold his beloved bike to buy paint and canvases. Together they created The One of the Sea during a moment on the pier when they laughed so hard at a fart that they nearly drowned. Every stroke of the painting was layered with their love and their desperation to save one another.

As the chapters alternate between the train journey and Ted’s memories, we learn of other crucial figures: Christian, a young school janitor and artist who first taught Kimkim that art is a homeland for misfits; Christian’s mother, an art historian who later recognizes Kimkim’s genius; and Ted’s own mother, whose lasagna and quiet care become a symbol of ordinary, sustaining love. We also glimpse Fish and her bond with Louisa. Louisa's grief had already hollowed Louisa out long before the story begins.

In the present, disaster strikes. After a series of misunderstandings, Louisa slips off the train, Ted is brutally beaten by two men in a station parking lot, and Louisa returns in time to rescue him with a metal pipe. They lose the painting, and they miraculously recover it thanks to a young mother from the train. The ashes are lost in transit—sent traveling forever by train—but Ted chooses to see that as fitting for Kimkim, who loved travel. Before dawn, Ted takes Louisa to the real sea for the first time and teaches her to swim, giving her a moment of pure joy.

When they finally reach the town by the sea, Ted brings Louisa to the churchyard, where he and his friends have a communal mourning spot. From there, they visit Joar, now a middle-aged man with an ankle monitor, a wrecked past, and the same sharp tongue. Over coffee, arguments, and rooftop conversations, Joar and Ted slowly reveal the end of the old story which includes Joar’s plan to kill his abusive father, his mother’s desperate attempt to take the knife and protect her son, and the freak accident at the harbor that left his father brain-damaged instead of dead. We learn that Ali moved abroad and found joy in surfing, only to drown at eighteen. Kimkim left for art school thanks to Christian’s mother and the harbor men who finally tried to do good. The friends buried rocks with their names near their crossroads.

The climax of those teenage years was their reverse heist, meaning breaking into the museum at night to hang The One of the Sea on the wall so Kimkim could see it where it belonged. Caught by a bemused security guard, they called the only adult who could understand, Christian’s mother. She recognized at once that Kimkim’s painting did not belong there because it was better than everything else. She carried it out as if it were alive and set in motion the path that would make him C. Jat.

In the present, Christian’s mother drives to Joar’s house and meets Louisa on the roof. The three adults and one teenager sit under the stars telling the rest of the story about Kimkim’s rise to fame, their losses, Ali’s death, and their own enduring shame and love. Christian’s mother is struck not only by Kimkim’s painting, which Ted brought back in a box, but by a drawing Louisa made of him. She recognizes that Louisa is not just a recipient of Kimkim’s legacy, but the next artist in the line. Together, they hatch a plan. Instead of selling The One of the Sea, they will break into the museum in Kimkim’s hometown and hang it there, turning it into a shared treasure. The alarm blares as they climb out the window. The next day headlines across the world marvel at the event.

In the final chapter, the plot jumps forward in time. Kimkim’s ashes have been returned home by train conductors. Louisa fills the town’s streets with chalk skulls and creatures. Ted returns to teaching, this time in prisons, hoping to reach kids like the boy who once stabbed him. Joar dreams of opening an engine-repair workshop in his backyard. Louisa, who is sent to art school by Ted and Joar emptying their savings, grows up, travels, and becomes a famous artist in her own right.

Years later, from some faraway city, Louisa calls Ted in the middle of his night, breathless with excitement. She has found another “one of us.” The person is a, young graffiti artist painting storms on a wall at the end of an alley. She thinks Ted should write a book about all of them. Sitting in his small house by the sea, looking toward the crossroads where four rocks still lie buried, Ted laughs and wonders what someone like him would even write about—though, by then, we already know the answer (216).