When Hisham Matar was a nineteen-year-old university student in England, his father went missing under mysterious circumstances. Hisham would never see him again, but he never gave up hope that his father might still be alive. Twenty-two years later, he returned to his native Libya in search of the truth behind his father’s disappearance. The Return is the story of what he found there.

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER and acclaimed memoir about fathers and sons, a legacy of loss, and, ultimately, healing. Hailed as “a first-person elegy for home and father.” Transforming his personal quest for answers into a brilliantly told universal tale of hope and resilience, Matar has given us an unforgettable work with a powerful human question at its core: How does one go on living in the face of unthinkable loss?  One of The New York Times Book Review’s ten best books of the year, winner of the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize

Reviews:
“The Return is not about one family. It’s the story of Libyan opposition and resistance, although the Matar family shapes the storyline. . . . The book describes how, cruelly, even the dimmest ray of hope can keep the families of the disappeared from accepting the possibility of their loss.”—The Christian Science Monitor

“In this triptych of beloved country, father, and the art that survives, Matar moves us with the force of his compassion, grace, and fury. . . . The Return is one of the most notable memoirs of our generation, by one of our most elegant living writers. In his testimony to the tenacity of the human spirit, Hisham Matar has shown us what language can do.”—Los Angeles Review of Books

 “Matar’sprose is both spare and soaring, transporting in the way a great painting or musical composition can be. His words are selected with careful intention; his sentences are at once poetic and conversational, his themes particular and universal. . . . Matar’s evocative writing and his early traumas call to mind Vladimir Nabokov . . . but where Nabokov’s loss of country and father were public and final . . . Matar’s are frustratingly indefinite. . . . There is no record. There is no grave. Only this elegy by a son who, through his eloquence, defies the men who wanted to erase his father and gifts him with a kind of immortality.”—The Washington Post

“An utterly riveting account of a devoted son’s quest to learn the fate—not necessarily the truth—of Jaballa Matar.”—The Boston Globe

“He writes eloquent and precise prose, and his deep inquiry into his father’s imprisonment and absence, and the conflicting details about his death, blend with consideration of Libya’s politics and history, to create a deeply resonant memoir.”—National Book Review

“At times almost unbearably moving . . . Hisham Matar is an observer and listener of enormous subtlety and sensitivity, and he writes English prose as cleanly and clearly as it can be written. This is a story of terrible deeds, but also a tale of mighty love, loyalty and courage. It simply must be read.”—The Spectator

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