A review by tessyoung
The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between by Hisham Matar

4.0

This was by no means an easy read but it was a beautiful one.
Matar tells the story of his return to Libya, the country which he had left as a child. He returns in search of his father who had been abducted from exile in Egypt and imprisoned for political opposition. In parts incredibly personal, in others LeCarre'esque.
There's so much to this narrative but I wanted to share just a bit of one particular section of the book that really jumped out at me. 
The description of Benghazi is perhaps one of the the best pieces of writing about the placeness of a city, of how differing periods of historic settlement, colonisation and ways of understanding the world are written into the fabric city and its identity. It's a wonderful piece of storytelling, all Libyan history told through a single city, but made even more compelling by the emotional charge from the entanglement of this national narrative with personal biography. Just beautifully done.