The Return

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WINNER OF THE 2017 PULITZER PRIZE: from Man Booker Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist Hisham Matar, a memoir of his journey home to his native Libya in search of answers to his father’s disappearance.

In 2012, after the overthrow of Qaddafi, the acclaimed novelist Hisham Matar journeys to his native Libya after an absence of thirty years.       

When he was twelve, Matar and his family went into political exile. Eight years later Matar’s father, a former diplomat and military man turned brave political dissident, was kidnapped from the streets of Cairo by the Libyan government and is believed to have been held in the regime’s most notorious prison.        

Now, the prisons are empty and little hope remains that Jaballa Matar will be found alive.  Yet, as the author writes, hope is “persistent and cunning.”       

Winner of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for biography/autobiography, the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, France’s Prix du livre étranger, and a finalist for the Orwell Book Prize and the 2016 National Book Critics Circle Award, The Return is a brilliant and affecting portrait of a country and a people on the cusp of immense change, and a disturbing and timeless depiction of the monstrous nature of absolute power.”A beautifully-written memoir that skillfully balances a graceful guide through Libya’s recent history with the author’s dogged quest to find his father who disappeared in Gaddafi’s prisons.” —Barack Obama 

“[The Return] is a quest for the truth in a dark time, constructed with a novelist’s skill, written in tones that are both precise and passionate. It is likely to become a classic.” —Colm Tóibín

“[The Return] is wise and agonizing and thrilling to read.” —Zadie Smith

“A moving, unflinching memoir of a family torn apart.” —Kazuo Ishiguro

“A brilliant book. The Return reads as easily as a thriller, but is a story that will stick; a person is lost but gravity and resonance remain.” —Hilary Mantel

“A magnificent memoir of exile and loss. Hisham Matar writes Libya’s contemporary history with a Proustian sensibility. . . . A timeless read.” —Rawi Hage

“Hisham Matar’s The Return . . . moved me to tears and taught me about love and home.” —Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“A masterpiece of a different kind. . . . [T]he natural delicacy of Matar’s writing, its concision and reserve, only heightens the power of a gripping and agonizing story.” —Alan Hollinghurst
 
“[A] haunting and terrifying story, told with courage, anger, dignity and unswerving determination.” —Blake Morrison
 
“The intelligence and grace of Matar’s writing is fuelled by a fierce and valid rage.”  —Rupert Thomson
 
“What makes The Return outstanding . . . is not its highly charged subject matter but its subtle and ingenious structure, and the patient attentiveness with which Matar observes and listens. A humane and haunting book.” —Lucy Hughes-Hallet
 
“A brilliant, moving and beautiful book about family, longing and exile.” —Matthew Dennison, Mary Loudon and Sarra Manning, judges of the 2016 Costa Biography Award
 
“The Return is an elegy by a son who, through his eloquence, defies the men who wanted to erase his father and gifts him with a kind of immortality.” —The Washington Post

“A triumph of art over tyranny, structurally thrilling, intensely moving, The Return is a treasure for the ages.” —Peter Carey 

“The Return is tremendously powerful. Although it filled me with rage again and again, I never lost sight of Matar’s beautiful intelligence as he tried to get to the heart of the mystery. I am so very grateful he has written this book.” —Nadeem Aslam, author of The Blind Man’s Garden

“[E]loquent. . . . [Matar] writes with both a novelist’s eye for physical and emotional detail, and a reporter’s tactile sense of place and time. The prose is precise, economical, chiseled; the narrative elliptical, almost musical. . . . [H]aunting.” —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times Book Review
 
“[B]eautifully described. . . . [M]agnificent.” —David Aaronovitch, The Times
 
“[M]oving and vividly documented. . . . Matar provides an intimate and absorbing account of the complex political events that would eventually lead to Gaddafi’s downfall. As he shifts his focus between past and present events, allowing details of his father’s disappearance to slowly and subtly emerge, he reveals a suspense novelist’s seasoned instincts. In his ruminations on returning to a long-forgotten family and country, and the consequences of time passing, he applies a poet’s sensibility. . . . A beautifully written, harrowing story of a son’s search for his father and how the impact of inexplicable loss can be unrelenting while the strength of family and cultural ties can ultimately sustain.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“[C]ompassionate, lyrical and deeply affecting.” —Jarrett Martineau, The Walrus
 
“[M]arvellously well-handled memoir. . . . The Return . . . burns with anger at the frustration of Hisham’s attempts to find out what had happened to his father. . . . Yet it is also remarkably composed and calmly written, its tone at times reminiscent of one of Kazuo Ishiguro’s puzzled, damaged narrators, at others of the skilful recovery of the past performed in Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes. Although highly informative about what it is to be part of Libya’s tormented history, it is even more valuable as an expression of both filial and paternal love.” —London Evening Standard

“Let’s begin with the obvious: read The Return before you read anything else. . . . Matar’s book-length elegy is significant both because of the story . . . and for the way the story is told. In this triptych of beloved country, father and the art that survives, Matar moves us with the force of his compassion, grace and fury. . . . Matar has . . . created something rare and literary with The Return, his own prayer for the dead. . . . [A]nger, suffering and loss flow all the way through in Matar’s precise and lyrical prose. . . . [I]n . . . sections, with hope of news of his father recharged, The Return becomes a gut-wrenching thriller. . . . Overall and throughout, Matar is a designer of language: the brick and mortar of this memoir relies on his training as an architect, stone mason and construction worker, all of which enforced discipline, repetition and structure. . . . The Return is one of the most notable memoirs of our generation, by one of our most elegant living writers. In his testimony to the tenacity of the human spirit, Hisham Matar has shown us what language can do.” —Leah Mirakhor, Los Angeles Review of Books

“[B]eautifully written account of Matar’s pained search. . . . Written with hard-won clarity and unsentimental intelligence, The Return stands comparison with the best literature of exile.” —Prospect Magazine
 
“[E]xtraordinary memoir. . . . [S]kilfully layered, this memoir is also a feat of imagination. Out of his protracted torment Matar has forged a memoir that in its nuance and nobility bears unforgettable witness to love, to courage and to humanity. The Return is also a subtle and nimble work of art. It shifts elegantly between past and present, between dialogue and soliloquy, between urgent, even suspenseful action and probing meditations on exile, grief and loss.” —Boyd Tonkin, Financial Times

Born in New York City to Libyan parents, HISHAM MATAR spent his childhood in Tripoli and Cairo and has lived most of his adult life in London. His debut novel, In the Country of Men, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and won numerous international prizes, including the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, a Commonwealth First Book Award, the Premio Flaiano, and the Premio Gregor von Rezzori. His second novel, Anatomy of a Disappearance, published in 2011, was named one of the best books of the year by The Guardian and the Chicago Tribune. His work has been translated into twenty-nine languages. He lives in London and New York.US

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