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In the Country of Men

In the Country of Men

by Hisham Matar
Hardback
Publication Date: 01/02/2008

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Libya, 1979. Nine-year-old Suleiman's days are circumscribed by the narrow rituals of childhood: outings to the ruins surrounding Tripoli, games with friends played under the burning sun, exotic gifts from his father's constant business trips abroad. But his nights have come to revolve around his mother's increasingly disturbing bedside stories full of old family bitterness. And then one day Suleiman sees his father across the square of a busy marketplace, his face wrapped in a pair of dark sunglasses. Wasn't he supposed to be away on business yet again? Why is he going into that strange building with the green shutters? Why did he lie?
Suleiman is soon caught up in a world he cannot hope to understand--where the sound of the telephone ringing becomes a portent of grave danger; where his mother frantically burns his father's cherished books; where a stranger full of sinister questions sits outside in a parked car all day; where his best friend's father can disappear overnight, next to be seen publicly interrogated on state television.
In the Country of Men is a stunning depiction of a child confronted with the private fallout of a public nightmare. But above all, it is a debut of rare insight and literary grace. "From the Hardcover edition."
ISBN:
9781606860922
9781606860922
Category:
Contemporary fiction
Format:
Hardback
Publication Date:
01-02-2008
Language:
English
Publisher:
Perfection Learning
Country of origin:
United States
Pages:
246
Dimensions (mm):
191x130x23mm
Weight:
0.24kg
Hisham Matar

Hisham Matar was born in New York City to Libyan parents and spent his childhood first in Tripoli and then in Cairo. He is the author of two novels, In the Country of Men and Anatomy of a Disappearance and a work of non-fiction, The Return. In the Country of Men was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Guardian First Book Award and the National Critics Book Circle Award in the US and won six international literary awards. The Return won a Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction and the Folio Prize and was shortlisted for several other awards around the world including the Baillie Gifford Prize for non-fiction. Hisham Matar lives in London.

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