The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between

Hisham Matar

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The Return won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for biography/autobiography, the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and France's Prix du livre étranger, and was a finalist for the Orwell Book Prize and the 2016 National Book Critics Circle Award. 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." 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.