Among Friends

At once a searing family drama and an elegant exploration of trust and betrayal, this infectious debut novel follows two men and their families in the aftermath of a shocking incident that threatens to tear their decades-long friendship apart.

Perfect lives hide terrible secrets

Having emerged from a childhood of poverty and neglect, Amos now has a life that others envy: a brilliant wife, a golden daughter, and a friendship that has anchored him for thirty years. All of that is set to change. In the course of one fateful weekend in a beautiful house upstate, Amos’s life will be undone by a shocking act of violence.

In its aftermath, Amos must ask: when your world collapses, what - and who - will you sacrifice to survive?

MEDIA REVIEWS

A wonderful, sly and subtle novel. Every sentence keeps you hanging in the air, waiting for the next punch to the gut. Wow. - Miranda Cowley Heller, author of The Paper Palace

In the way that a forceful intelligence or an infectious voice or a fresh vision can alter how we observe and answer the world, Among Friends brought me into its cool environs and made me engage my days differently. It's no small accomplishment for a first novel, or for any novel. - Richard Ford

Among Friends is a powerful, elegant novel that offers unsparing and lyrically rendered insight into the lives of others - Claire Lombardo, the New York Times bestselling author of The Most Fun We Ever Had

Among Friends is smart and nuanced about the damage people are prepared to endure in the name of loyalty and comfort. The deep desire to only hear the story we want, or need, to be true. I was completely drawn in - Claire Lynch, author of A Family Matter

Among Friends is a masterly debut. Hal Ebbott ranges from the most exquisite, Jamesian discriminations to the graspable, all-American solidities of Updike and Richard Yates. This is a writer to watch, with excitement and the highest expectations - John Banville, author of The Sea

The violation that befalls these two families has the unalterable destiny a Greek dramatist like Sophocles might have imagined. Hal Ebbott has written an exquisitely crafted family tragedy. - John Irving

Impressively nuanced . . . Among Friends is a bracingly honest and affectingly intimate depiction of abuse, family dynamics and self-deceit. It is sharply observed and psychologically astute, somehow both passionate and dispassionate, and it upends its characters’ lives so ruthlessly and revealingly that it is hard not to take pleasure in a false facade being finally smashed. - The Guardian

Two dear male friends - after many years of friendship one of them does something unforgivable. Or is it? What makes this novel work is how much Ebbot leaves out. He never comes into a scene a word too soon or stays a sentence too late - Noami Alderman, Books of the Year, The Spectator

It’s beautifully written and packs a huge emotional punch. I couldn’t put it down and kept thinking about it long after I finished. Brilliant - Daily Mail

Ebbott's voice and language set the book apart from other family dramas - NPR

Ebbott is obviously a writer of lavish talents in all the old-school virtues of sentence-writing, paragraph-building, dialogue, characterisation, plot and pacing . . . as the properly page-turning repercussions continue, it’s not just the action that darkens, but the whole social setting - Daily Telegraph