Anatomy of a Disappearance

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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.

A fable of loss, and an often troubling meditation on fathers and sons. Matar is writing from the heart
Observer

About Hisham Matar

Hisham Matar was born in New York to Libyan parents, spent his childhood in Tripoli and Cairo and has lived most of his life in London. His memoir The Return received a Pulitzer Prize in 2017. He is also the author of In the Country of Men, shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Anatomy of a Disappearance and A Month in Siena. His most recent novel, My Friends, won the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction 2024, was longlisted for the Booker Prize, and nominated for the National Book Award. His work has been translated into over thirty languages.

Details

Imprint: Penguin
Published: 24/11/2016
ISBN: 9780141027500
Length: 256 pages
Dimensions: 198mm x 16mm x 129mm
Weight: 185g
Price: £9.99

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Anatomy of a Disappearance

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A fable of loss, and an often troubling meditation on fathers and sons. Matar is writing from the heart

This beautiful, subtle novel, like the lives of its characters, repays many readings

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

I was moved and very impressed

Each time I had to put it down I couldn't wait to get back to it

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

Matar suffuses Nuri's education in love and loss with an erotic frisson and fragile grace that lend the book an inner radiance

Submerged grief gives this fine novel the mythic inexorability of Greek tragedy

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

About Hisham Matar

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