Anatomy of a Disappearance: A Novel - Hardcover

Matar, Hisham

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385340443 ISBN 13: 9780385340441

Publisher: Dial Pr, 2011

Synopsis

Nuri is a young boy when his mother dies. It seems that nothing will fill the emptiness that her strange death leaves behind in the Cairo apartment he shares with his father. Until they meet Mona, sitting in her yellow swimsuit by the pool of the Magda Marina hotel. As soon as Nuri sees her, the rest of the world vanishes. But it is Nuri’s father with whom Mona falls in love and whom she eventually marries. And their happiness consumes Nuri to the point where he wishes his father would disappear.

Nuri will, however, soon regret what he wished for. His father, long a dissident in exile from his homeland, is taken under mysterious circumstances. And, as the world that Nuri and his stepmother share is shattered by events beyond their control, they begin to realize how little they knew about the man they both loved.

Anatomy of a Disappearance is written with all the emotional precision and intimacy that have won Hisham Matar tremendous international recognition. In a voice that is delicately wrought and beautifully tender, he asks: When a loved one disappears, how does their absence shape the lives of those who are left?

About this title

Review:

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

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

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)

I was moved and very impressed (Roddy Doyle)

Each time I had to put it down I couldn't wait to get back to it (Michael Frayn)

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)

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

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

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)

From the Back Cover:

'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.

'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

'I was moved and very impressed' Roddy Doyle

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

'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

About this edition

• Publisher: Dial Pr
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0385340443
• ISBN 13: 9780385340441
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256