Anatomy of a Disappearance

A fable of loss, and an often troubling meditation on fathers and sons. Matar is writing from the heart * Observer * This beautiful, subtle novel, like the lives of its characters, repays many readings -- Helen Dunmore * The Times * 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 * Ahdaf Soueif * I was moved and very impressed -- Roddy Doyle Each time I had to put it down I couldn't wait to get back to it -- Michael Frayn 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 * Sunday Times * Matar suffuses Nuri's education in love and loss with an erotic frisson and fragile grace that lend the book an inner radiance * Independent * Submerged grief gives this fine novel the mythic inexorability of Greek tragedy * Economist * 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 * Sunday Telegraph *

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 was the recipient of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize, the PEN/Jean Stein Award and the Rathbones Folio Prize among others, and was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford, the Costa Biography and the National Book Critics Circle Awards. 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. Matar is a Professor at Barnard College, Columbia University. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Academy of Arts. His work has been translated into over thirty languages.