The First Friend by Malcolm Knox
2025 Shortlist - Adult Category
About Malcolm Knox
Malcolm Knox grew up in Sydney. Since 1994 Malcolm has written for the Sydney Morning Herald and has won three Walkley Awards and a Human Rights Award. His novels include Summerland; A Private Man, winner of the Ned Kelly Award; Jamaica, which won the Colin Roderick Award and was shortlisted in the 2008 Prime Minister's Literary Awards; The Life; The Wonder Lover; and Bluebird. His many non-fiction titles include Boom: The Underground History of Australia; From Gold Rush to GFC, which won the 2013 Ashurst Business Literature Prize; and Bradman's War, shortlisted in the 2013 Prime Minister's Literary Awards.
About The First Friend
Even the worst person has a best friend.
A chilling black comedy, The First Friend imagines a gangster mob in charge of a global superpower.
The Soviet Union 1938: Lavrentiy Beria, 'The Boss' of the Georgian republic, nervously prepares a Black Sea resort for a visit from 'The Boss of Bosses', his fellow Georgian Josef Stalin. Under escalating pressure from enemies and allies alike, Beria slowly but surely descends into murderous paranoia.
By his side is Vasil Murtov, Beria's closest friend since childhood. But to be a witness is dangerous; Murtov must protect his family and play his own game of survival while remaining outwardly loyal to an increasingly unstable Beria. The tension ramps up as Stalin's visit and the inevitable bloodbath approaches. Is Murtov playing Beria, or is he being played?
The First Friend is a novel in a time of autocrats, where reality is a fiction created by those who rule. Reflecting on Putin's Russia, Trump's America, Xi's China and Murdoch's planet Earth, it is at once a satire and a thriller, a survivor's tale in which a father has to walk a tightrope every day to save his family from a monster and a monstrous society. Where safety lies in following official fictions, is a truthful life the ultimate risk?
Malcolm Knox says: “It's an honour to have The First Friend shortlisted for the ARA Historical Novel Prize. With our memory under daily assault, the past has never been more relevant. All of us - not just fiction writers and readers - would be lost without the lens of history. By drawing attention to the historical novel, this prize couldn't be more timely.”
From the judging panel: In The First Friend, Malcolm Knox leads us into the lived and terrible truths of the Soviet Union during Stalin’s reign, with a confronting novel on the dark arts of surveillance and punishment in that time. Beyond Lavrentiy Beria and other historical protagonists, the author includes a few invented characters who allow for a fuller picture of the impacts on individuals of a murderous political regime. But as much as The First Friend is a fictional account of individuals, their compromises or psychopathology, the novel shows how the system was wielded to control life and death across a whole society. This is a taut, sometimes frightening, sometimes blackly comic work, that confirms the worst in human conduct is never far away while autocrats and totalitarianism are allowed their rule.
