The Return by Hisham Matar

This month’s Big Read features The Return by Hisham Matar.

Matar writes of his encounter with some of his father’s early short stories: ‘…he was a writer responding to ghosts and to history. Then, at some point, a crack opened and politics seeped in.’ There could be no better summation of his own book, the memoir of a family, and a son beset by the turbulent history of twentieth century Libya, in which the principal ghost is Matar’s own father – by turns: businessman, poet, activist – who becomes one of the ‘disappeared’ and whose uncertain fate haunts the book and the reader, as it haunts Matar.

At times an excoriating read, this is also an astonishingly tender book, which conjures the author’s homeland in all its beauty as well as its ravages and celebrates the enduring bonds of family, despite all that exile can impose.

The Return is the winner of numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize in Biography, and the Pen America Literary Award.

Led by Caroline Heaton: Caroline is the co-editor (with Christine Park) of Close Company: Stories of Mothers and Daughters and Caught in a Story: Contemporary Fairytales and Fables. Her poetry has been published in literary journals and anthologies and set to music by composer Malcolm Hill.

Here are a few things to think about while you’re reading:

1. How did you respond to the depiction of the relationship between father and son?

2. Has the book deepened your understanding of the effects of exile?

3. Why do you think the author has chosen to use a non-linear narrative?

4. How does the book explore the central themes of memory and identity?

5. What resonance does the book have for you in the light of recent world events?

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