They lived in exile in Egypt where Hisham and his brother completed their schooling in Cairo. Due to political persecutions by the Ghaddafi regime, in 1979 his father was accused of being a reactionary to the Libyan revolutionary regime and was forced to flee the country with his family. When he was three years old, his family went back to Tripoli, Libya, where he spent his early childhood. Hisham Matar was born in New York City, where his father was working for the Libyan delegation to the United Nations. This book is a profoundly moving family memoir, a brilliant and affecting portrait of a country and a people on the cusp of immense change, and a disturbing and timeless depiction of the monstrous nature of absolute power. Yet, as the author writes, hope is "persistent and cunning". Now, the prisons are empty and little hope remains that Jaballa Matar will be found alive. Eight years later Matar's father, a former diplomat and military man turned brave political dissident, was kidnapped from the streets of Cairo by the Libyan government and is believed to have been held in the regime's most notorious prison. When he was twelve, Matar and his family went into political exile. In 2012, after the overthrow of Qaddafi, the acclaimed novelist Hisham Matar journeys to his native Libya after an absence of thirty years. From Man Booker Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist Hisham Matar, a memoir of his journey home to his native Libya in search of answers to his father's disappearance.
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