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Published Aug 2011
240 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
Nuri is a young boy when his mother dies. It seems that nothing will fill the emptiness that her strange death leaves behind in the Cairo apartment he shares with his father. Until they meet Mona, sitting in her yellow swimsuit by the pool of the Magda Marina hotel. As soon as Nuri sees her, the rest of the world vanishes. But it is Nuri's father with whom Mona falls in love and whom she eventually marries. And their happiness consumes Nuri to the point where he wishes his father would disappear.
Nuri will, however, soon regret what he wished for. His father, long a dissident in exile from his homeland, is taken under mysterious circumstances. And, as the world that Nuri and his stepmother share is shattered by events beyond their control, they begin to realize how little they knew about the man they both loved.
Anatomy of a Disappearance is written with all the emotional precision and intimacy that have won Hisham Matar tremendous international recognition. In a voice that is delicately wrought and beautifully tender, he asks: When a loved one disappears, how does their absence shape the lives of those who are left?
"Starred Review. Matar offers a searing vision of familial rupture and disintegration in his trenchant follow-up to In the Country of Men." - Publishers Weekly
"First serial rights were sold to The New Yorker. Get it." - Library Journal
"...Matar cautiously and evocatively explores the unique and terrifying world in which Nuri finds himself.... A son without closure writes sparingly and brilliantly about what it is to suffer loss without end." - Kirkus Reviews
"Sculpted in a prose of clutter-free, classical precision... a pure demonstration of the strange alchemy of fiction." - The Independent (UK)
"A tenderly written novel with Shakespearean themes, it can be read as a deeply personal account of the losses that tyranny and exile produce." - The Times Literary Supplement (UK)
"Haunting in every sense... An absorbing novel that finds its eloquence in what is left unsaid." - The Sunday Times (London)
"Submerged grief gives this fine novel the mythic inexorability of Greek tragedy." - The Economist
"A fable of loss, and an often troubling meditation on fathers and sons... Hisham Matar is writing from the heart." - The Guardian (UK)
"Two things stood out as I read Anatomy of a Disappearance. First, there was the quiet power of the language, and the author's control of it. Second, there was Hisham Matar's ability to tell a story that from the first sentence seems inevitable, yet is full of surprises. I was moved and very impressed." – Roddy Doyle
This information about Anatomy of a Disappearance was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo: © Diana Matar
Hisham Matar was born in 1970 in New York City where his father, Jaballa
Matar, worked for the Libyan delegation to the United Nations. When
he was three years old, his family returned to Tripoli, Libya where he spent his
early childhood until political persecution forced his mother to flee with the
children first to Kenya and then to Egypt, where they settled in Cairo and
Hisham and his brother Ziad attended a school with 70 pupils per classroom (the
only school they could afford). Later, Hisham's father managed to get out of
Libya and join them.
In Cairo, Hisham's father began his political work in earnest: writing against
the Libyan regime and mobilizing the various factions of the exiled Libyan
resistance to unite in order to overthrow the regime...
... Full Biography
Author Interview
Name Pronunciation
Hisham Matar: ma-TARR
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