The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between
SynopsisPlot
When Hisham Matar was a nineteen-year-old university student in England, his father went missing under mysterious circumstances. Hisham would never see him again, but he never gave up hope that his father might still be alive. Twenty-two years later, he returned to his native Libya in search of the truth behind his father’s disappearance. The Return is the story of what he found there.
Story
About this book
Hisham Matar grew up in Libya before his family left the country in political exile when he was twelve. His father, Jaballah Matar, had been a diplomat and military officer who became a political dissident opposed to the Qaddafi regime. Eight years after the family's departure, Jaballah was abducted from the streets of Cairo by Libyan agents and is believed to have been held in one of the regime's prisons. For more than two decades, his son had no confirmed knowledge of his fate.
In 2012, following the fall of Qaddafi, Hisham Matar traveled back to Libya for the first time in thirty years. The Return follows that visit and the search for information about his father. The prisons had been opened, yet answers remained scarce. Matar writes about the country he finds upon returning, its people navigating a period of upheaval, and the personal weight of revisiting places tied to family memory and loss.
The book is a work of memoir that moves between past and present, between London, Cairo, and Libya. It received the Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography, with the citation describing it as a first-person elegy for home and father.
