For those who are sitting reading this, thinking, ‘Matar, yes … now why do I know that name?’, I’m happy to give an answer. Back in 2006, Matar authored a superb debut novel, In the Country of Men, which was duly shortlisted for the Booker prize that year. Amid a field of big-hitting female writers such as Kate Grenville, Sarah Waters, M.J. Hyland and Kiran Desai (the eventual winner, with Inheritance of Loss), Matar was fêted as ‘the outside chance’ with his nuanced tale of enduring love and relationships, set against a backdrop of political repression and activism.

Drawing heavily upon personal experience for this novel, as with his previous offering, Matar crafts a firstly idyllic (though sad), then haunting and poignant tale of regret and loss. The closeness between Nuri and his father Kamal begins to crack with the death of Nuri’s mother and the introduction of the beautiful Mona. When Kamal, a prominent political activist, suddenly disappears, the last vestiges of that closeness are shattered, leaving both Nuri and Mona at a loss, emotionally ragged. Even Nuri’s connection (or fascination) with Mona – at first warm – is irreparably damaged with his father’s absence. Here, Matar cleverly alters his style, clipping his sentences and tone to convey the sense of anxiety and distress. In 1990 Matar’s own father, a critic of Libya’s infamous dictator Colonel Gaddafi, was kidnapped in Cairo by Egyptian service agents.

In January 2010, shortly before finishing this novel, Matar reflected upon this experience in a Guardian article. With that knowledge, the reader can see the young Matar in his protagonist, and can sense the author’s own hope for resolution for himself and for Nuri: ‘In one dream I am sitting on a bench, knowing he will come.’

Julia Jackson is from Readings Carlton