The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land In Between

Shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award 2016
Shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction 2016

Surely such journeys were reckless. This one could rob me of a skill that I have worked hard to cultivate: how to live away from places and people I love… Return and you will face the absence or the defacement of what you treasured… Leave and your connections to the source will be severed… What do you do when you cannot leave and cannot return?

Hisham Martar’s debut novel of 2006, the Booker-shortlisted In the Country of Men, heralded the arrival of a fine literary talent and those same abilities gild this searing account of the abduction and subsequent disappearance of his Libyan father at the hands of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi in 1990.

The years that followed – years soaked with rage and unanswered questions – course through this volume as Matar seeks out a figure who is increasingly a ghost, hindered by Gaddafi’s deadly minions and the dark forces of international politics.

‘Bears unforgettable witness to love, to courage and to humanity.’ - Boyd Tonkin, The Financial Times