A Month in Siena

FROM THE PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING AND MAN BOOKER-SHORTLISTED AUTHOR 
 
'Sparkles with brilliant observations on art and architecture, friendship and loss' Guardian 
 
'Everybody should get to spend a month with Mr. Matar, looking at paintings' Zadie Smith, Wall Street Journal, Books of the Year 
_______________________________________________ 
 
Matar was nineteen years old when his father was kidnapped. In the year following he found himself turning to art, particularly the great paintings of the Sienese School. They became a refuge and a way to think about the world outside the urgencies of the present. 
 
A quarter of a century later, having found no trace of his father, Matar finally visits the birthplace of those paintings. A Month in Siena is the encounter between the writer and the city. It is an immersion in painting, a consideration of love, grief and a profoundly moving contemplation of the relationship between art and life. 
_______________________________________________ 
 
'A dazzling exploration of art's impact on his life and writing, and a moving contemplation of grief' Financial Times 
 
'I can think of no better expression of the humane than this economical, modest, yet altogether breathtaking book' New Statesman, Books of the Year 
 
'Bewitching, intensely moving' The Economist, Books of the Year

An intensely moving book, at once an affirmation of life's quiet dignities in the face of loss and a portrait of a city that comes to stand for all cities

This slim, beautifully produced book, sparkles with brilliant observations on art and architecture, friendship and loss. Matar's prose is exquisitely measured and precise - not unlike one of the paintings from the Sienese school that he has admired for so many years

This book tells us much about the extraordinary power of art to inspire

What a jewel this is, driven by desire, grief, yearning loss, illuminated by hope, the kindness of strangers continually making tribute to the delicacy and grace of the Arab home the author lost so many years ago

Peter Carey, The Australian, Books of the Year

A fluid series of meditations on the big questions of life, on love, faith, time and on the nature and purpose of art, the influence of architecture and, most important of all to this author, grief, mourning and memory

Mingles insightful and often moving art history with frank personal recollection in a way that reminds us of the communality we share not only with our contemporaries, but with all historical epochs. I can think of no better expression of the humane than this economical, modest, yet altogether breathtaking book

Hisham Matar is a brilliant narrative architect and prose stylist, his pared-down approach and measured pace a striking complement to the emotional tumult of his material

What interests him in this art is the human knowledge the painter is trying to convey. The description is exact and graceful, as Matar's prose tends to be

New York Times, 11 New Books We Recommend This Week

A Month in Siena bears all the hallmarks of Matar's writing: it is exquisitely constructed and the use of language is precise and delicately nuanced without pretension. And there is a deceptive simplicity to his endeavour: to look at art. What emerges is an altogether more complex philosophical exploration of death, love, art, relationships and time

A deeply moving, engrossing book. Written in elegant, concise prose, it is a remarkable mediation on life, loss, mourning, exile, friendship and the power of art

Hisham Matar has the quality all historians - of the world and the self - most need: he knows how to stand back and let the past speak

A thing of beauty and wisdom

A dazzling exploration of art's impact on his life and writing, and a moving contemplation of grief

An exquisite, deeply affecting book

Everybody should get to spend a month with Mr. Matar, looking at paintings

Bewitching . . . Meditating on art, history and the relationship between them, this is both a portrait of a city and an affirmation of life's quiet dignities in the face of loss

Hisham Matar was born in New York to Libyan parents, spent his childhood in Tripoli and Cairo and has lived most of his life in London. His memoir The Return received a Pulitzer Prize in 2017. He is also the author of In the Country of Men, shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Anatomy of a Disappearance and A Month in Siena. His most recent novel, My Friends, won the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction 2024, was longlisted for the Booker Prize, and nominated for the National Book Award. His work has been translated into over thirty languages.

Shortly after completing his searing work of non-fiction, The Return, Hisham Matar set off for Siena, a city he had never visited before. His plan was to see the paintings of the Sienese school, to immerse himself in the work of artists he admired perhaps above all others. 
 
This month in Siena would be an extraordinary period in the life of this writer: an immersion in art, a consideration of grief and violence, an intimate encounter with the city and its inhabitants. Hisham Matar's short book is the story of how art can console and disturb in equal measure. It is a profoundly moving contemplation of the relationship between art and the human condition.

Fathers, Sons and the Land In Between

The Return

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE IN BIOGRAPHY 
WINNER OF THE RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZE 
SHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION 
SHORTLISTED FOR THE COSTA BIOGRAPHY AWARD 
SHORTLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR AUTOBIOGRAPHY 
WINNER OF THE SLIGHTLY FOXED BEST FIRST BIOGRAPHY PRIZE 
ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES' TOP 10 BOOKS OF 2016 
 
The Return is at once a universal and an intensely personal tale. It is an exquisite meditation on how history and politics can bear down on an individual life. And yet Hisham Matar's memoir isn't just about the burden of the past, but the consolation of love, literature and art. It is the story of what it is to be human. 
 
Hisham Matar was nineteen when his father was kidnapped and taken to prison in Libya. He would never see him again. Twenty-two years later, the fall of Gaddafi meant he was finally able to return to his homeland. In this moving memoir, the author takes us on an illuminating journey, both physical and psychological; a journey to find his father and rediscover his country. 
 
'A beautifully-written memoir that skillfully balances a graceful guide through Libya's recent history with the author's dogged quest to find his father' Barack Obama 
 
Hisham Matar's new novel My Friends is available now!

What a brilliant book. The Return reads as easily as a thriller, but is a story that will stick; a person is lost but gravity and resonance remain

A total work of art. It reminded me of Solzhenitsyn. It is of the same importance. I love it.

A profound and powerful meditation on love, loss and exile

Stands comparison with the best literature of exile

A tale of mighty love, loyalty and courage

A masterful memoir, a searing meditation on loss, exile, grief, guilt, belonging and, above all, family.

[A] profound work of witnessing and grief... leaves a deep emotional imprint

A moving, unflinching memoir of a family torn apart by the savage realities of today's middle east

I have always admired Matar's tender and compassionate but equally strong and compelling voice

Mr. Matar is not a wonderful writer because his father disappeared or because his homeland is a mess: he is a brilliant narrative architect and prose stylist, his pared-down approach and measured pace a striking complement to the emotional tumult of his material . . . This book is an extraordinary gift for us all

Breathtaking memoir... an elegy by a son who, through his eloquence, defies the men who wanted to erase his father and gifts him with a kind of immortality

The Return moved me to tears and taught me about love and home

A desolating and powerful account of his son's search for his father, in life and death

Is it a sign, or a consequence, of this dreadful year that the best books displayed stern lucidity in the face of darkness and death? Hisham Matar's search for his "disappeared" father in The Return (note how badly British politicians come out of it)

A masterpiece . . . Its concision and reserve only heighten the power of a gripping and agonising story

The Return is the self portrait of a haunting, a kind of political ghost story - made more unbearable by the beauty of its prose

The intelligence and grace of Matar's writing is fuelled by a fierce and valid rage

For Matar, hope depends on individuals and families standing by cherished values

Times Literary Supplement Books of the Year

A haunting and terrifying story, told with courage, anger, dignity and unswerving determination

Among the best of the year's writing... This book is his masterful ink-stained resistance

A beautifully-written memoir that skillfully balances a graceful guide through Libya's recent history with the author's dogged quest to find his father'

Hisham Matar was nineteen when his father was kidnapped and taken to prison in Libya. He would never see him again. Twenty-two years later, after the fall of Gaddafi, Hisham was finally able to return to his homeland for the first time. In this heart-breaking, illuminating memoir he describes his return to a country and a family he thought he would never see again. 
 
The Return is at once a universal and an intensely personal tale of loss. It is an exquisite meditation on history, politics and art. It's the story of what it is to be human.

Anatomy of a Disappearance

In Egypt, Nuri, a teenage boy, falls in love with Mona - the woman his father will marry. Consumed with longing, Nuri wants to get his father out of the way - to take his place in Mona's heart. But when his father disappears, Nuri regrets what he wished for. Alone, he and Mona search desperately for the man they both love. Only for Nuri to discover a silence he cannot break and unimaginable secrets his father never wanted him to know. 
 
Hisham Matar's new novel My Friends is available for pre-order now!

A fable of loss, and an often troubling meditation on fathers and sons. Matar is writing from the heart

This beautiful, subtle novel, like the lives of its characters, repays many readings

Hisham Matar is a master of the evocative; he creates his effects, on the page and on our nervous system with the fewest and most telling words. I was spellbound

Each time I had to put it down I couldn't wait to get back to it

Haunting in every sense. An absorbing novel that finds its  eloquence in what is left unsaid and its most vivid imagery in what has  been lost, possibly for ever

Matar suffuses Nuri's education in love and loss with an erotic frisson and fragile grace that lend the book an inner radiance

Submerged grief gives this fine novel the mythic inexorability of Greek tragedy

Sensually written, there is an extravagant feel even to the simplest sentence. From start to finish that exquisitely profound quality of uncertainty is the most wrenching aspect of all

In Egypt, Nuri, a teenage boy, falls in love with Mona - the woman his father will marry. Consumed with longing, Nuri wants to get his father out of the way - to take his place in Mona's heart. But when his father disappears, Nuri regrets what he wished for. Alone, he and Mona search desperately for the man they both love. Only for Nuri to discover a silence he cannot break and unimaginable secrets his father never wanted him to know.

In the Country of Men

Shortlisted for both the Man Booker Prize and the Guardian First Book Award, and published here as a Penguin Essential for the first time. 
 
Nine-year-old Suleiman is just awakening to the wider world beyond the games on the hot pavement outside his home and beyond the loving embrace of his parents. He becomes the man of the house when his father goes away on business, but then he sees his father, standing in the market square in a pair of dark glasses. Suddenly the wider world becomes a frightening place where parents lie and questions go unanswered. Suleiman turns to his mother, who, under the cover of night, entrusts him with the secret story of her childhood. 
 
Hisham Matar's new novel My Friends is available now!

Nine-year-old Suleiman is just awakening to the wider world beyond the games on the hot pavement outside his home and beyond the loving embrace of his parents. He becomes the man of the house when his father goes away on business, but then he sees his father, standing in the market square in a pair of dark glasses. Suddenly the wider world becomes a frightening place where parents lie and questions go unanswered. Suleiman turns to his mother, who, under the cover of night, entrusts him with the secret story of her childhood.

Hisham Matar

A deeply touching, beautifully composed book

I have always admired Matar's tender and compassionate but equally strong and compelling voice

My Friends is a brilliant novel about innocence and experience, about friendship, family and exile. It makes clear, once more, that Hisham Matar is a supremely talented novelist.

Hisham Matar's MY FRIENDS recounts an exile's life shattered by violence, yet sustained, fiercely if complicatedly, by friendship. An unforgettable novel -- wise, urgent and profound -- from one of our era's great writers.

It is impossible to describe the profound depth and beauty of this book. MY FRIENDS is a breathtaking novel, every page a miracle and an affirmation. If there is a language of exile, MY FRIENDS is what it sounds like: exquisite and painful, compassionate and unflinching, and above all, overwhelming in its boundless hope that within exile rests a path towards a different kind of return. One that leads us back to ourselves. Hisham is one of our greatest writers, how lucky we are to be in his midst.

Maaza Mengiste, author of THE SHADOW KING, shortlisted for the Booker Prize

'I could not love this book more. Reflective, compelling, deeply tender at times, there are surprising shifts and turns and moments of utter brilliance where new understanding blooms. A walk across London from King&rsquo;s Cross Station to Shepherd's Bush gives rise to memories of a life diverted by a moment of political action. About friendship, exile, belonging, lives lived and not lived, and Libya's recent past, London emerges as a place of refuge, a transitory half-home even after three decades, a stepping stone. As soon as I finished, I started again beguiled by Matar&rsquo;s long, sinuous sentences and enlivened by my new knowledge of what it was all about, my heart moving in my chest. My Friends is the most beautiful, complete, masterful novel I have read in a long time. Read it.'

Priscilla Morris, author of the Women's Prize shortlisted BLACK BUTTERFLIES

Tender, precise, and incredibly moving, MY FRIENDS is a rare novel, holding so much of the human heart that it is at times unbearably real. It’s impossible to read this book without feeling a renewed connection to the world and all its intricate sorrow and love.

Seán Hewitt, author of ALL DOWN DARKNESS WIDE

Poignant and quietly suspenseful... Readers encountering Matar for the first time will find in “My Friends” a masterly literary meditation on his lifelong themes. For those who already know his work, the effect is amplified tenfold.

Meditative yet propulsive – as well as structurally inventive – the narrative puts us in Khaled’s mind as he walks across his adopted city while reflecting on youth, exile and the flashpoints of Libya’s recent history

Dazzling...a personal, deeply felt work...tightly structured and controlled, looping back and forth through time and memory, building on itself in a process of gradual expansion and revelation

Matar weighs... complexities with tremendous sensitivity, and My Friends is not only indispensable for a full understanding of Libyan émigrés but is, more generally, a great novel of exile

A richly sustained meditation on exile and friendship, love and distance, deepening with each page as layers of recollection and experience accrue

Alexandra Harris, chair of the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction judging panel

Exploring identity, family, friendship and exile in a strange land, Matar has produced a work of emotional depth

This novel is equally (as The Return) delicate, intellectually and emotionally, and equally bold in its formal arrangement…the book is artfully paced. Long, mellifluous, meditative sentences are punctuated by short ones of bell-like clarity…this is a book about exile and violence and grief, but it is above all – as the title tells us – a study in friendship

Riveting and humane... At the core of My Friends is a powerful juxtaposition of loneliness and camaraderie, self-reliance and dependence, which defines the outline of exile... [Matar] shows us with masterful command how life happens at the intersection of the personal and political, what we can control and what we cannot.

A novel about friendship, intimacy, and making new lives in cities – set in the context of geopolitics and exile, it is very much My Thing

My Friends is quite possibly Hisham Matar&rsquo;s best work yet, and that&rsquo;s saying something. A quiet detonation of a novel, this masterful inquiry into the nature of friendship, exile and place is not so much to be read as lived through. The depth of thought, the unflinchingly honest confrontation with loss and longing, is there on every page, in every moment. Very few writers alive can converse with negative space the way Matar does, and My Friends is stunning, beautiful proof.

Omar El Akkad, author of AMERICAN WAR and WHAT STRANGE PARADISE

A profound celebration of the sustaining power of friendship, of the ways we mold ourselves against the indentations of those few people whom fate presses against us

It is this careful observation of intimacy amid the trials of, first, a terrifying dictatorship and, later, a bloody revolution that marks My Friends as a masterpiece of historical narrative to set alongside, say, Doctor Zhivago or Lampedusa’s The Leopard. But what lingers most after Khaled’s tale is done is the vital and moving depiction of conviviality that he gradually pieces together, like an intricate philosophical jigsaw puzzle, on the night-long walk through London that informs his narrative

A vivid, finely crafted story about home and exile, family and friendship, loss and rebirth. The old adage that fiction is truer than fact comes to mind... an engaging, symphonic novel of overlapping lives and loyalties'

A moving study of friendship and the effects on a person of living in exile

Hisham Matar crafts a beautiful piece of personal, character-driven fiction from real-life events in his utterly deserved Orwell prize-winner

Part historical fiction, part cultural reflection, this is a story about the way exile calcifies the heart into an organ of brittle longing... a profound celebration of the sustaining power of friendship, of the ways we mold ourselves against the indentations of those few people whom fate presses against us

Hisham Matar's profoundly moving and unsettling novel My Friends haunted my year. He writes of exile, of friendships woven from "great affection and loyalty" but also "Absence and suspicion", and you walk with him through a London filled with the whispers of writers' ghosts, memories and betrayal. Unforgettable

This is an expansive, absorbing masterclass in storytelling... he reflects movingly on exile, literature and friendship

Daily Mail - Dive into the best novels to give this Christmas

My Friends is Matar's most political novel, but also an intimate meditation on friendship and love and everything in between. It is deeply affecting, generous and wise, and all these virtues come in writing of extraordinary elegance, with one of those voices that you want to listen to for the rest of your life.

May be the best novel of all those I read this year... My Friends looks like a modern classic

A beautifully crafted novel exploring the bonds between three Libyan men living far away from their homeland... Hisham Matar is a wonderfully gifted storyteller and his touch is deft but delicate. This subtle, meditative novel is a book for grown-ups.

In January, we kick things off with My Friends (Viking) by Hisham Matar, a powerful story of friendship and loss. Khaled and Mustafa are wounded by government agents during a protest at the Libyan embassy in London. The pair find themselves torn between the comforts of their life in the UK and the horrors of a civil war at home

Manage[s] the difficult trick of being political and personal as well as telling a great story

The Irish Times - The best books of 2024 so far

I loved this sweeping yet intimate, powerful yet subtle tale of Libyan exiles in London and the way politics shapes lives.

What a pleasure and relief that one of the first novels of the new year should be such a success - and in the face of very high expectations

A moving meditation on friendship and exile from the Booker-shortlisted novelist

Khaled and Mustafa meet at university in Edinburgh: two Libyan eighteen-year-olds expecting to return home after their studies. In a moment of recklessness and courage, they travel to London to join a demonstration in front of the Libyan embassy. When government officials open fire on protestors in broad daylight, both friends are wounded, and their lives forever changed. 
 
Over the years that follow, Khaled, Mustafa and their friend Hosam, a writer, are bound together by their shared history. If friendship is a space to inhabit, theirs becomes small and inhospitable when a revolution in Libya forces them to choose between the lives they have created in London and the lives they left behind.

Hisham Matar

Praise for My Friends

A deeply touching, beautifully composed book

I have always admired Matar's tender and compassionate but equally strong and compelling voice

My Friends is a brilliant novel about innocence and experience, about friendship, family and exile. It makes clear, once more, that Hisham Matar is a supremely talented novelist.

A deeply touching, beautifully composed book

I have always admired Matar's tender and compassionate but equally strong and compelling voice

My Friends is a brilliant novel about innocence and experience, about friendship, family and exile. It makes clear, once more, that Hisham Matar is a supremely talented novelist.

A deeply touching, beautifully composed book

I have always admired Matar's tender and compassionate but equally strong and compelling voice

My Friends is a brilliant novel about innocence and experience, about friendship, family and exile. It makes clear, once more, that Hisham Matar is a supremely talented novelist.

Books by Hisham Matar

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