Anatomy of a Disappearance - Hardcover

Matar, Hisham

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 067091651X ISBN 13: 9780670916511

Publisher: Viking, 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 Mona. When Nuri first sees Mona, sitting in her bright yellow swimsuit by the pool of the Magda Marina holiday resort, the rest of the world vanishes. But it is Nuri?s father with whom Mona falls in love and who she will eventually marry. And their happiness consumes Nuri to the point where he longs to get his father out of the way. However, Nuri will soon regret what he wished for. And, as he and his stepmother?s world is shattered by events beyond their control, they both begin to realise how little they really knew about the man they loved. In a voice that is delicately wrought and beautifully tender, Hisham Matar asks, in his extraordinary new novel, when a loved one disappears how does their absence shape the lives of those who are left?

About this title

Review:

Haunting in every sense, Anatomy of a Disappearance is 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)

The ability of fiction to convey injustice with a unique emotional power means that novels can change history . . . Mr Matar is the writer who has done most to convey the reality of Col Gaddafi's Libya (Gideon Rachman Financial Times)

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

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

(Telegraph)

A curiously engaging story that takes one into a world that seems simultaneously remote and familiar as something in a dream. Each time I had to put it down I couldn't wait to get back to it

(Michael Frayn)

A tenderly written novel with Shakespearean themes, it can be read as a deeply personal account of the losses that tyranny and exile produce

(TLS)

Probably represents the most important artistic response yet to the trauma of Arab dictatorship . . . Matar is beginning to do for the Arab experience what the likes of Salman Rushdie have done for the sub-continent (Sathnam Sanghera The Times)

Two things stood out as I read Anatomy of a Disappearance. First, there was the quiet power of the language, and the author's control of it. Second, there was Hisham Matar's ability to tell a story that from the first sentence seems inevitable, yet is full of surprises

(Roddy Doyle)

It has a dreamlike quality, in spite of Matar's cool and lapidary prose. It is a fable of loss, and an often troubling meditation on fathers and sons . . . Hisham Matar is writing from the heart

(Observer)

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

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: Viking
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 067091651X
• ISBN 13: 9780670916511
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 256