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Anatomy of a Disappearance
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  • Published: 28 March 2012
  • ISBN: 9780141969787
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 256

Anatomy of a Disappearance




'This beautiful, subtle novel, like the lives of its characters, repays many readings' Helen Dunmore, The Times

In Egypt, Nuri, a teenage boy, falls in love with Mona - the woman his father will marry. Consumed with longing, Nuri wants to get his father out of the way - to take his place in Mona's heart. But when his father disappears, Nuri regrets what he wished for. Alone, he and Mona search desperately for the man they both love. Only for Nuri to discover a silence he cannot break and unimaginable secrets his father never wanted him to know.

  • Published: 28 March 2012
  • ISBN: 9780141969787
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 256

About the author

Hisham Matar

Hisham Matar was born in New York City to Libyan parents and spent his childhood first in Tripoli and then in Cairo. His first novel, In the Country of Men, was published in 2006 and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Guardian First Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award in the US. It won six international literary awards, including the Commonwealth Writers' Prize Best First Book award for Europe and South Asia, the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, and the inaugural Arab American Book Award. It has been translated into twenty-eight languages. Hisham Matar lives in London.

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Praise for Anatomy of a Disappearance

Sensually written, there is an extravagant feel even to the simplest sentence. From start to finish that exquisitely profound quality of uncertainty is the most wrenching aspect of all

Sunday Telegraph

Submerged grief gives this fine novel the mythic inexorability of Greek tragedy

Economist

Matar suffuses Nuri's education in love and loss with an erotic frisson and fragile grace that lend the book an inner radiance

Independent

Haunting in every sense. An absorbing novel that finds its eloquence in what is left unsaid and its most vivid imagery in what has been lost, possibly for ever

Sunday Times

Each time I had to put it down I couldn't wait to get back to it

Michael Frayn

I was moved and very impressed

Roddy Doyle

Hisham Matar is a master of the evocative; he creates his effects, on the page and on our nervous system with the fewest and most telling words. I was spellbound

Ahdaf Soueif

This beautiful, subtle novel, like the lives of its characters, repays many readings

Helen Dunmore, The Times

A fable of loss, and an often troubling meditation on fathers and sons. Matar is writing from the heart

Observer