Hisham Matar's Books

The Return

Fathers, Sons, and the Land in Between

By: Hisham Matar

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The Return

Fathers, Sons, and the Land in Between

By: Hisham Matar

Hisham Matar was 19 when his father was kidnapped and taken to prison in Libya. He would never see him again. 22 years later, after the fall of Gaddafi, Hisham was finally able to return to his homeland for the first time. In this heart-breaking, illuminating memoir he describes his return to a country and a family he thought he would never see again

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243

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ISBN 10

0399589430

ISBN 13

9780399589430

The Return (Pulitzer Prize Winner)

Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between

By: Hisham Matar

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The Return (Pulitzer Prize Winner)

Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between

By: Hisham Matar

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE • The acclaimed memoir about fathers and sons, a legacy of loss, and, ultimately, healing—one of The New York Times Book Review’s ten best books of the year, winner of the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century When Hisham Matar was a nineteen-year-old university student in England, his father went missing under mysterious circumstances. Hisham would never see him again, but he never gave up hope that his father might still be alive. Twenty-two years later, he returned to his native Libya in search of the truth behind his father’s disappearance. The Return is the story of what he found there. The Pulitzer Prize citation hailed The Return as “a first-person elegy for home and father.” Transforming his personal quest for answers into a brilliantly told universal tale of hope and resilience, Matar has given us an unforgettable work with a powerful human question at its core: How does one go on living in the face of unthinkable loss? NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times • The Washington Post • The Guardian • Financial Times “A tale of mighty love, loyalty and courage. It simply must be read.”—The Spectator (U.K.) “Wise and agonizing and thrilling to read.”—Zadie Smith “[An] eloquent memoir . . . at once a suspenseful detective story about a writer investigating his father’s fate . . . and a son’s efforts to come to terms with his father’s ghost, who has haunted more than half his life by his absence.”—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times “This outstanding book . . . roves back and forth in time with a freedom that conceals the intricate precision of its art.”—The Wall Street Journal “Truly remarkable . . . a book with a profound faith in the consolations of storytelling . . . a testament to [Matar’s] father, his family and his country.”—The Daily Telegraph (U.K.) “The Return is a riveting book about love and hope, but it is also a moving meditation on grief and loss. . . . Likely to become a classic.”—Colm Tóibín “Matar’s evocative writing and his early traumas call to mind Vladimir Nabokov.”—The Washington Post “Utterly riveting.”—The Boston Globe “A moving, unflinching memoir of a family torn apart.”—Kazuo Ishiguro, The Guardian “Beautiful . . . The Return, for all the questions it cannot answer, leaves a deep emotional imprint.”—Newsday “A masterful memoir, a searing meditation on loss, exile, grief, guilt, belonging, and above all, family. It is, as well, a study of the shaping—and breaking—of the bonds between fathers and sons. . . . This is writing of the highest quality.”—The Sunday Times (U.K.)

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273

Publisher

Random House Trade Paperbacks

Published Date

ISBN 10

0812985087

ISBN 13

9780812985085

In the Country of Men

A Novel

By: Hisham Matar

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In the Country of Men

A Novel

By: Hisham Matar

Libya, 1979. Nine-year-old Suleiman’s days are circumscribed by the narrow rituals of childhood: outings to the ruins surrounding Tripoli, games with friends played under the burning sun, exotic gifts from his father’s constant business trips abroad. But his nights have come to revolve around his mother’s increasingly disturbing bedside stories full of old family bitterness. And then one day Suleiman sees his father across the square of a busy marketplace, his face wrapped in a pair of dark sunglasses. Wasn’t he supposed to be away on business yet again? Why is he going into that strange building with the green shutters? Why did he lie? Suleiman is soon caught up in a world he cannot hope to understand—where the sound of the telephone ringing becomes a portent of grave danger; where his mother frantically burns his father’s cherished books; where a stranger full of sinister questions sits outside in a parked car all day; where his best friend’s father can disappear overnight, next to be seen publicly interrogated on state television. In the Country of Men is a stunning depiction of a child confronted with the private fallout of a public nightmare. But above all, it is a debut of rare insight and literary grace.

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273

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Random House Trade Paperbacks

Published Date

ISBN 10

0385340435

ISBN 13

9780385340434

A Month in Siena

By: Hisham Matar

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A Month in Siena

By: Hisham Matar

From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Return comes a profoundly moving contemplation of the relationship between art and life. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST AND EVENING STANDARD After finishing his powerful memoir The Return, Hisham Matar, seeking solace and pleasure, traveled to Siena, Italy. Always finding comfort and clarity in great art, Matar immersed himself in eight significant works from the Sienese School of painting, which flourished from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries. Artists he had admired throughout his life, including Duccio and Ambrogio Lorenzetti, evoke earlier engagements he’d had with works by Caravaggio and Poussin, and the personal experiences that surrounded those moments. Including beautiful full-color reproductions of the artworks, A Month in Siena is about what occurred between Matar, those paintings, and the city. That month would be an extraordinary period in the writer’s life: an exploration of how art can console and disturb in equal measure, as well as an intimate encounter with a city and its inhabitants. This is a gorgeous meditation on how centuries-old art can illuminate our own inner landscape—current relationships, long-lasting love, grief, intimacy, and solitude—and shed further light on the present world around us. Praise for A Month in Siena “As exquisitely structured as The Return, driven by desire, yearning, loss, illuminated by the kindness of strangers. A Month in Siena is a triumph.”—Peter Carey

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145

Publisher

Random House

Published Date

ISBN 10

059312913X

ISBN 13

9780593129135

Anatomy of a Disappearance

A Novel

By: Hisham Matar

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Anatomy of a Disappearance

A Novel

By: Hisham Matar

This mesmerizing literary novel is written with all the emotional precision and intimacy that have won Hisham Matar tremendous international recognition. In a voice that is delicately wrought and beautifully tender, he asks: When a loved one disappears, how does that absence shape the lives of those who are left? “A haunting novel, exquisitely written and psychologically rich.”—The Washington Post Nuri is a young boy when his mother dies. It seems that nothing will fill the emptiness her death leaves behind in the Cairo apartment he shares with his father—until they meet Mona, sitting in her yellow swimsuit by the pool of the Magda Marina hotel. As soon as Nuri sees Mona, the rest of the world vanishes. But it is Nuri’s father with whom Mona falls in love and whom she eventually marries. Their happiness consumes Nuri to the point where he wishes his father would disappear. Nuri will, however, soon regret what he’s wished for. When his father, a dissident in exile from his homeland, is abducted under mysterious circumstances, the world that Nuri and his stepmother share is shattered. And soon they begin to realize how little they knew about the man they both loved. “At once a probing mystery of a father’s disappearance and a vivid coming-of-age story . . . This novel is compulsively readable.”—The Plain Dealer “Studded with little jewels of perception, deft metaphors and details that illuminate character or set a scene.”—The New York Times “One of the most moving works based on a boy’s view of the world.”—Newsweek “Elegiac . . . [Hisham Matar] writes of a son’s longing for a lost father with heartbreaking acuity.”—Newsday Don’t miss the conversation between Hisham Matar and Hari Kunzru at the back of the book. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE Chicago Tribune • The Daily Beast • The Independent • The Guardian • The Daily Telegraph • Toronto Sun • The Irish Times Look for special features inside. Join the Circle for author chats and more.

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Page Count

273

Publisher

Dial Press Trade Paperback

Published Date

ISBN 10

0385340451

ISBN 13

9780385340458

My Friends

A Novel

By: Hisham Matar

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My Friends

A Novel

By: Hisham Matar

LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE AND THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD • A “masterly” (The New York Times, Editors’ Choice), “riveting” (The Atlantic) novel of friendship, family, and the unthinkable realities of exile, from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Return “A profound celebration of the sustaining power of friendship, of the ways we mold ourselves against the indentations of those few people whom fate presses against us.”—The Washington Post WINNER OF THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL FICTION One evening, as a young boy growing up in Benghazi, Khaled hears a bizarre short story read aloud on the radio, about a man being eaten alive by a cat, and has the sense that his life has been changed forever. Obsessed by the power of those words—and by their enigmatic author, Hosam Zowa—Khaled eventually embarks on a journey that will take him far from home, to pursue a life of the mind at the University of Edinburgh. There, thrust into an open society that is miles away from the world he knew in Libya, Khaled begins to change. He attends a protest against the Qaddafi regime in London, only to watch it explode into tragedy. In a flash, Khaled finds himself injured, clinging to life, unable to leave Britain, much less return to the country of his birth. To even tell his mother and father back home what he has done, on tapped phone lines, would expose them to danger. When a chance encounter in a hotel brings Khaled face-to-face with Hosam Zowa, the author of the fateful short story, he is subsumed into the deepest friendship of his life. It is a friendship that not only sustains him but eventually forces him, as the Arab Spring erupts, to confront agonizing tensions between revolution and safety, family and exile, and how to define his own sense of self against those closest to him. A devastating meditation on friendship and family, and the ways in which time tests—and frays—those bonds, My Friends is an achingly beautiful work of literature by an author working at the peak of his powers.

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Page Count

394

Publisher

Random House

Published Date

ISBN 10

081299485X

ISBN 13

9780812994858

In the Country of Men

By: Hisham Matar

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In the Country of Men

By: Hisham Matar

On a white-hot day in Tripoli in the summer of 1979, nine-year-old Suleiman is shopping in the market square with his mother. His father is away on business - but Suleiman is sure he has just seen him, standing across the street. Why doesn't he come over when he knows Suleiman's mother is falling apart? Whispers intensify around Suleiman as his friend's father disappears and his mother frantically burns his father's books. As Suleiman begins to wonder whether his father has gone for good, it feels as if the walls of his home will break with the secrets held within.

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244

Published Date

ISBN 10

0670916439

ISBN 13

9780670916436

The Return (Pulitzer Prize Winner)

Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between

By: Hisham Matar

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The Return (Pulitzer Prize Winner)

Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between

By: Hisham Matar

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Page Count

273

Publisher

Random House Trade Paperbacks

Published Date

ISBN 10

0812985087

ISBN 13

9780812985085

A Month in Siena

By: Hisham Matar

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A Month in Siena

By: Hisham Matar

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Page Count

145

Publisher

Random House

Published Date

ISBN 10

0593129148

ISBN 13

9780593129142

Anatomy of a Disappearance

A Novel

By: Hisham Matar

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Anatomy of a Disappearance

A Novel

By: Hisham Matar

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Page Count

241

Publisher

Dial Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0679643982

ISBN 13

9780679643982

The Next Arab Decade

Alternative Futures

By: Hisham Sharabi

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The Next Arab Decade

Alternative Futures

By: Hisham Sharabi

This book is concerned with defining the nature of the crisis of the Arab world, with tracing its possible development, and with charting the conditions of its possible outcomes, addressing the next decade from the vantage of 1986 rather than that of 1985.

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Page Count

329

Publisher

Routledge

Published Date

ISBN 10

1000303985

ISBN 13

9781000303988

Book's by Hisham Matar

The Return

The Return

The Return (Pulitzer Prize Winner)

The Return (Pulitzer Prize Winner)

In the Country of Men

In the Country of Men

A Month in Siena

A Month in Siena

Anatomy of a Disappearance

Anatomy of a Disappearance

My Friends

My Friends

In the Country of Men

In the Country of Men

The Return (Pulitzer Prize Winner)

The Return (Pulitzer Prize Winner)

A Month in Siena

A Month in Siena

Anatomy of a Disappearance

Anatomy of a Disappearance

The Next Arab Decade

The Next Arab Decade

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