The Return

Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between

By: Hisham Matar

Narrated by: Hisham Matar

Pulitzer Prize, Biography/Autobiography, 2017

From the author of In the Country of Men, a Man Booker Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, comes a beautifully written, uplifting memoir of his journey home to his native Libya in search of the truth behind his father's disappearance.

When Hisham Matar was a 19-year-old university student in England, his father was kidnapped. One of the Qaddafi regime's most prominent opponents in exile, he was held in a secret prison in Libya. Hisham would never see him again. But he never gave up hope that his father might still be alive. "Hope," as he writes, "is cunning and persistent." Twenty-two years later, after the fall of Qaddafi, the prison cells were empty, and there was no sign of Jaballa Matar. Hisham returned with his mother and wife to the homeland he never thought he'd go back to again.

The Return is the story of what he found there. It is at once an exquisite meditation on history, politics, and art; a brilliant portrait of a nation and a people on the cusp of change; and a disquieting depiction of the brutal legacy of absolute power. Above all, it is a universal tale of loss and love and of one family's life. Hisham Matar asks the harrowing question: How does one go on living in the face of a loved one's uncertain fate?

©2016 Hisham Matar (P)2016 Audible, Inc.

Critic reviews

• Pulitzer Prize, Biography, 2017

“ The Return is a riveting book about love and hope, but it is also a moving meditation on grief and loss. It draws a memorable portrait of a family in exile and manages also to explore the politics of Libya with subtlety and steely intelligence. It is a quest for the truth in a dark time, constructed with a novelist's skill, written in tones that are both precise and passionate. It is likely to become a classic.” (Colm Tóibín)

“A triumph of art over tyranny, structurally thrilling, intensely moving, The Return is a treasure for the ages.” (Peter Carey)

“What a brilliant book. Hisham Matar has the quality all historians - of the world and the self - most need: He knows how to stand back and let the past speak. In chronicling his quest for his father, his manner is fastidious, even detached, but his anger is raw and unreconciled; through his narrative art he bodies out the shape of loss and gives a universality to his very particular experience of desolation.” (Hilary Mantel)

a beautiful book, and a perfect reading by the aut

Matar is a master storyteller, beautifully and lyrically intertwining social and personal loss. and he narrated the story incredibly well.

Thank you

This is the first book that has really grabbed me on many planes for a very long time. I’m also thinking audiobooks are just better when narrated by the author.

Moving and informative

A little slow at the start, but develops into a beautiful mixture of history, witness, and poetry.

Behind the headlines of Quadafi's dictatorship

A son campaigns most of his adult life to discover the fate of dissapeared father. He presents us with the sadistic machinations of a twisted regiem and the nobility of the survivors who fought for liberation.

Worthy of the Pulitzer and more!

I could not stop listening to the account this sincere and brilliant storyteller put together.
I will buy this book and comment on the margins.
I feel now closer to the experience of political martyrs and those who love them.
Grateful for the experience of reading this book.