The Return
by Hisham Matar
Back to Libya after the revolution. Where's his father?
For you if
you need to understand what it means to spend twenty years not knowing if someone you love is alive or dead
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Matar's father was a Libyan dissident who was kidnapped by Gaddafi's agents in Cairo in 1990 and disappeared into the Libyan prison system. For twenty years the family received occasional letters, then nothing. After the revolution Matar returned to Libya to find out what happened. This memoir — which won the Pulitzer Prize — is the record of that search and its devastating inconclusion. One of the most important books about loss, political violence, and the specific grief of the unresolved ever written.
Where This Book Lives
- Setting
- Libya • North Africa
- Voice
- Written by a Libyan author
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