New Shoes Are Always Significant

Sure, it's a story of migrants and the lives they have carved out in their new hometown. Each story is unique to every migrant. In this, we have the narrator who seems to have made it good for himself in London. This is 'New Shoes' by Hisham Matar, published in The New Yorker on September 6, 2026.

A young man left Cairo at 18 years old and worked in Italy and France, and finally settled in London. After eight years, he now owns a string of small newsagent shops. Money was tight back then, and he was the one who was able to leave Cairo instead of his older brother. Once he found stability in London, he was able to send more money home to his family in Cairo. His family warned him to stay away from politics because "politics brings only ruin".

I hate London. I hate and love it all at once. I haven’t told my brother this, out of fear that he would realize we only hate and love the places we believe we will never leave. I know how he thinks. Nor have I told him that I have always accepted that people like me are unwanted here. Needed, perhaps, but not wanted. It is plain to see. Nor have I told him that I learned to be O.K. with this, that in London, as in life, it is impossible to go on without a degree of indifference. You have to not give a shit.

All this to say that I am fine. I have learned to be away and I am doing well. Discovered a talent for business. I now manage not one but three shops, what here they call newsagents.

The story opens with said young man who is now much older. 12 years have passed since he left Cairo. He has only visited Cairo 12 times since, once a year. He talks to his older brother over the phone regularly, and he was told that he was still seen in Cairo walking down the street just some months ago. At cafes, in bookshops, etc. These played in his mind. He was homesick too, for his birth city of Zamalek. He hopes to return one day and make a life there. 

The brother's conversation topics got weirder and weirder. Every call included him telling the narrator that someone swore that they spotted him Cairo. There's this idea of a doppelganger of the narrator walking around in Cairo when the person in question lived in London, and only visits once a year. 

Readers begin to wonder if it's the brother's memories of the narrator that's presenting itself in these forms, or perhaps afflicted by a sort of dementia. We don't even know if these friends actually told the brother they saw the narrator, or the encounters are in the brother's head.  

I sensed, in my brother’s accounts of these supposed sightings, a tone of wavering disappointment. After his initial amusement, a vague concern lodged itself in his throat, coloring his words. What is even stranger is that I, too, began to sense myself divided, half here and half there. And so, whenever he said that someone had seen me at a particular café or bookshop or walking along one of the streets he and I know so well, I began to feel that I was elsewhere, daydreaming, as though the occasion had birthed in me a violent longing for home and my family. My present self, the self that had left and was getting on with the business of daily life in London, had somehow become divorced from the former and now somewhat hypothetical version of the man I might have become had I remained on my native soil. As the days rolled on, I held on to this superstition that I was cleaving in two. I began to feel lonesome, even more so than before, which made it all the more disturbing that in those alleged accounts of me in Cairo I was either alone or embroiled in some uneasy dispute. My life in London, the life I had cobbled together with the barest of routines, grew thin and unconvincing. It now seldom felt real.

After yet another odd phone call with the brother recounting someone else who said had seen the narrator in an argument with an older man, the narrator was shook. This was a phone call that happened after three weeks of radio silence from the brother. 

The book ended with the narrator buying a pair of fancy shoes at a fancy boutique on Jermyn Street. He chose a pair of lace-ups in horse leather. It cost eight hundred pounds. There was a 14-day return policy as long as the shoes weren't worn. He made a conscious decision to put it on immediately, and walked out of the store wearing it. It's a significant gesture. 

I stuffed my old pair in the box and walked to Trafalgar Square. I sat outside the Admiralty pub, lifted my foot up to the sky, and took a photo with Nelson on his column in the background. I sent it to my brother, with the words “New shoes.”

I could see that he had seen it. I watched the screen, expecting him to reply. I looked down at my feet and felt shame and regret. Eight hundred pounds is fifty-six thousand Egyptian pounds, I calculated. That is equivalent to half of my father’s annual salary. All spent on a pair of shoes. And my feet hurt in them. The man in the shop had said that’s because they would need to be broken in. I put the phone in my pocket. The sun was out. It was a nice evening. I decided to walk all the way home.

The ending isn't exactly left open-handed. The shopping spoke volumes. In an interview with Cressida Leyshon, the author is asked why the ending is such, 

At the end of the story, the narrator decides to go shopping for shoes on Jermyn Street, one of London’s toniest destinations when it comes to buying shirts, shoes, and accessories for men. Why did you want to send him there? What do the shoes represent to him?

I’d rather not spell it out. A good reader will know.

I laughed. Yeah. New shoes, as the titled suggested. And on Jermyn Street. But of course. I got that. It's a rite of passage, sort of. He absolutely would have to.