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. Above all, it is a universal tale of loss and love and of one family's life. 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. The Return is the story of what he found there. Hisham returns with his mother and wife to the homeland he never thought he'd go back to again. '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. But he never gave up hope that his father might still be alive. One of the Qaddafi regime's most prominent opponents in exile, he was held in a secret prison in Libya. The acclaimed memoir of a son's search for the truth behind his father's disappearance-one of The New York Times Book Review's ten best books of the year and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award 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.

Fathers and Sons by Howard Cunnell