Product Description

From the author of In the Country of Men a Man Booker Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist comes a beautifully written uplifting memoir of his journey home to his native Libya in search of the truth behind his fathers disappearance.

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY
The New York Times Book Review " The Washington Post " The Guardian " Financial Times

When Hisham Matar was a nineteen-year-old university student in England his father was kidnapped. One of the Qaddafi regimes most prominent opponents in exile he was held in a secret prison in Libya. Hisham would never see him again. But he never gave up hope that his father might still be alive. Hope as he writes is cunning and persistent.

Twenty-two years later after the fall of Qaddafi the prison cells are empty and there is no sign of Jaballa Matar. Hisham returns with his mother and wife to the homeland he never thought hed go back to again. The Return is the story of what he found there. It is at once an exquisite meditation on history?? politics?? and art?? a brilliant portrait of a nation and a people on the cusp of change?? and a disquieting depiction of the brutal legacy of absolute power. Above all?? it is a universal tale of loss and love and of one family??s life. Hisham Matar asks the harrowing question: How does one go on living in the face of a loved one??s uncertain fate?

Praise for The Return

??[Matar] writes with both a novelist??s eye for physical and emotional detail?? and a reporter??s tactile sense of place and time. . . . The Return is?? at once?? a suspenseful detective story about a write