The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between

When Hisham Matar was a nineteen-year-old university student in England, his father was kidnapped. One of the Qaddafi regime's most prominent opponents in exile, he was held in a secret prison in Libya. Hisham would never see him again. But he never gave up hope that his father might still be alive. Twenty-two years later after the fall of Qaddafi, Hisham returns with his mother and wife to the homeland he never thought he'd go back to again, in search of the truth behind his father's disappearance. The Return is the story of what he found there. It is a brilliant portrait of a nation and a people on the cusp of change, a disquieting depiction of the brutal legacy of absolute power, and a universal tale of loss and love and of one family's life.