In the Country of Men
by Hisham Matar
Gaddafi's Libya, seen through a nine-year-old.
For you if
you want to understand what it feels like to grow up in a country where your father's politics could get the whole family killed
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Suleiman is nine years old in Tripoli in 1979, and his father is involved in something dangerous that the boy doesn't fully understand. Matar reconstructs a childhood lived under surveillance and fear with extraordinary precision — the specific texture of a society where informers are everywhere and trust is dangerous. The dispatch from inside the domestic life of a family that a regime has decided to destroy, told through a child who can see what's happening but not yet name it.
Where This Book Lives
- Setting
- Libya • North Africa
- Voice
- Written by a Libyan author
- Topics
- gaddafi regime
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