n 2012, after the Arab Spring and Qaddafi’s assassination, Hisham Matar returned to Libya for the first time, more than 30 years after his family fled the country in 1979. This return is the journey of finding his father or finding out what happened to his father, a political dissident kidnapped in 1990, while living in Cairo, by the Egyptian secret police and turned over to Qaddafi. 

The family had not seen him in 22 years and had not heard from him since 1996. Grasping any details they could find and buoyed by hope, Matar fights for the truth, even interacting with Qaddafi’s son to seek information. But deep in his heart, Hisham knows it’s likely that his father, Jaballa Matar, died in a massacre at the horrific Abu Salim prison in 1996. 

This is a son’s story of love and loss and grief for the father stolen from him. And it’s a country’s story of loss and ruin, from its days of Italian occupation, its brief independence under King Idris, its ruthless rule under Qaddafi’s dictatorship, and its post Arab Spring fall into civil war. It’s a country the author thinks of as home but also never a home as he has spent most of his life in Egypt and London. Libya was never safe or stable enough to move back, so he is always an outsider, one of the few in his extended family who did not spend decades in Qaddafi’s prisons. 

This Pulitzer Prize winning memoir, moving back and forth in time, is beautifully written conveying a deep understanding of how the author and so many others were robbed, by Gaddafi’s regime, of family, country, futures, and answers. 5⭐️