The Return

In 1990 Hisham Matar's father, a prominent dissident against the Libyan dictatorship, was kidnapped by the regime's agents and imprisoned, and Matar, then a university student in England, never saw him again. The family had gone into political exile when Matar was twelve; his father had earlier been a diplomat and military man. This memoir follows the novelist's return to Libya in 2012, after the regime's overthrow, to find out what became of him, at a time when the prisons stood empty and little hope remained. The book received the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in Biography or Autobiography, the inaugural PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and, as the first non-fiction winner, the 2017 Folio Prize.

Barack Obama chose it for his best of 2018 list on Facebook.