Anatomy of a Disappearance
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.
Reviews
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
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
