Anatomy of a Disappearance

Description

'This beautiful, subtle novel, like the lives of its characters, repays many readings' Helen Dunmore, The Times In Egypt, Nuri, a teenage boy, falls in love with Mona - the woman his father will marry. Consumed with longing, Nuri wants to get his father out of the way - to take his place in Mona's heart. But when his father disappears, Nuri regrets what he wished for. Alone, he and Mona search desperately for the man they both love. Only for Nuri to discover a silence he cannot break and unimaginable secrets his father never wanted him to know.

Hisham Matar was born in New York City to Libyan parents and spent his childhood first in Tripoli and then in Cairo. He is the author of two novels, In the Country of Men and Anatomy of a Disappearance, and a work of non-fiction, The Return. In the Country of Men was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Guardian First Book Award and the National Critics Book Circle Award in the US and won six international literary awards. The Return won a Pulitzer Prize, the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, the Folio Prize and was shortlisted for many other awards including the Baillie Gifford Prize. Hisham Matar lives in London.

A fable of loss, and an often troubling meditation on fathers and sons. Matar is writing from the heart * Observer * This beautiful, subtle novel, like the lives of its characters, repays many readings -- Helen Dunmore * The Times * Hisham Matar is a master of the evocative; he creates his effects, on the page and on our nervous system with the fewest and most telling words. I was spellbound * Ahdaf Soueif * I was moved and very impressed -- Roddy Doyle Each time I had to put it down I couldn't wait to get back to it -- Michael Frayn Haunting in every sense. An absorbing novel that finds its eloquence in what is left unsaid and its most vivid imagery in what has been lost, possibly for ever * Sunday Times * Matar suffuses Nuri's education in love and loss with an erotic frisson and fragile grace that lend the book an inner radiance * Independent * Submerged grief gives this fine novel the mythic inexorability of Greek tragedy * Economist * Sensually written, there is an extravagant feel even to the simplest sentence. From start to finish that exquisitely profound quality of uncertainty is the most wrenching aspect of all * Sunday Telegraph *