Disappearance

Author: Hisham Matar

Hisham knows how to stir emotions and instincts; he creates his effect, both on the page and in our nervous system, with the fewest and most telling words. I was captivated. "Ahdaf Soueif" Nuri was young when his mother died, and he never imagined that anyone could fill the void left by his mother's departure from his life with his father until Muna appeared. Nuri saw her first, before she married his father at a ceremony Nuri refused to attend. Then Muna moved to live with them in the Zamalek apartment, and the lives of all three changed completely. Nuri was consumed by hatred for his father and his new life with Muna, to the point where he wished for his father's disappearance from his life; this was before his father's sudden and mysterious disappearance. As time passed, events accelerated, and Nuri and Muna sought to uncover the secret of his father's disappearance, they discovered, in his absence, details they had been unaware of about the lives of those they loved most. In a smooth and engaging language, Hisham Matar, in his novel "Disappearance," questions how to continue life when a loved one disappears. Hisham Matar was born in New York to Libyan parents and spent his childhood in Tripoli, then in Cairo. His first novel, "In the Country of Men," was published in 2006 and was shortlisted for both the Man Booker Prize and the Guardian First Book Award in Britain, and the National Book Critics Circle Award in America. It won numerous international literary awards, including the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Europe and South Asia, the Ondaatje Prize, and the Italian Premio Flaiano for Best Novel, and has been translated into twenty-eight languages. Hisham Matar lives in London and New York, where he works as an assistant professor at Barnard College, Columbia University.