Hisham Matar:  The Return, Viking (Penguin Random House) UK, paperback: March 2017, 9780241966280, available as hardback 9780670923335, 14,99 GBP

SHORTLISTED FOR THE COSTA BIOGRAPHY AWARD
SHORTLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR AUTOBIOGRAPHY
WINNER OF THE SLIGHTLY FOXED BEST FIRST BIOGRAPHY PRIZE
ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES' TOP 10 BOOKS OF 2016”

“The Return” is a truly remarkable book, one of the most talked about non-fiction titles of last year, coming with highest recommendations from most critics.  

As a fan of his previous novels “In the Country of Men” and “Anatomy of a Disappearance”, I was eager to read “The Return”.  In my opinion both his previous novels should become required reading in schools, dealing with dictatorship, tyranny, totalitarian regimes and their effect and consequence  on people’s  lives.  With Erdogan in Turkey and Trump in the US trying to turn democracy into an autocracy, his memoir is a tremendous account of what could happen to any of us if democracy fails.

“The Return” is also a haunting book, I could not read it in one go it affected me so deeply.  Colm Toibin said this book will become a classic, I could not agree more.  Hisham Matar is a brilliant writer, his novels all draw from his real life experience,  the traumatic effect his father’s disappearance left on him and his family. Jaballa Matar, a Libyan diplomat living in Cairo in exile with his family, was abducted by Gaddafi’s secret police disappearing in one of the nightmare prisons, Abu Salim, the worst. The atrocities prisoners experienced there are incomprehensible.  Jaballa Matar was one of the most well-known resistence fighters, as were other family members, cousins, uncles – most of them ending in prison for up to 20 years. How they and others survived is astonishing. Hisham Matar spent his entire adult life trying to find out what happened to his father, holding on to hope to find him alive.  After the uprisings in Egypt, Tunis and finally the toppling of Gaddafi’s regime, many relatives were released from prison. But Jaballa Matar remained lost. This book is about Hisham’s return to Libya, the account of his continued, stubborn search for his father with family members, brother and mother remembering the man they lost and loved, their fate entwined with recent Libyan history.