The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land In Between

"I think The Return is probably the easiest read. It’s one of those books that you can sit and read, very easily, in one sitting. Hisham Matar is telling one story, rather than weaving together many different elements. It’s about a UK-based writer whose father disappeared in Libya. At the start of the book, he is about to go back to Libya, having left as a small child to go into exile. He’s interweaving his own journey to Libya, after the fall of Gaddafi, with the story of his father and his efforts to find the truth of what happened to him. At the start of the book, he is not 100% sure his father is dead — though he is assumed dead in one of Gaddafi’s prisons. “It’s beautifully written. He’s a novelist.” The story is gripping in itself and, although many books have been written about the Arab Spring and different regimes in the Middle East, I didn’t feel I had read such a personal story of Gaddafi’s Libya. Basically, yes. He tries to piece together the story, talking to people who were in that particular prison. At various points they didn’t even know which prison he was in because he was being moved around. The regime, for a time, was not even confirming that he was in prison. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter It’s beautifully written. He’s a novelist. For me, it’s about the quality of the writing as well as the content, which is obviously very poignant. To have a novelist approach this subject made this a great book. One added feature is his relationship with his father. The love between a father and a son comes out in a really beautiful way and without being too drippy. I feel Iran features a lot in stories and the popular imagination, and we also tend to be very focused on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Libya is not a country one has read or heard as much about. Gaddafi came across almost as a cartoon character, from a Not the Nine O’Clock News clip. He was the dictator that somehow had an almost comical status. I don’t think it came into popular consciousness in the UK how bad he actually was. The relationship with the UK was also quite compromising. That comes through a bit in the book because Hisham tries to find out what happened to his father at the same time as Blair was having a partial rapprochement with Gaddafi. So there’s a little bit of tension with the British establishment. It’s a story that’s told much less often, and the way he tells it is beautiful."