A new novel from the author of In the Country of Men, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Guardian First Book Award and winner of six international literary awards. The Times called it “Extraordinary…One of the most brilliant literary debuts of recent years”
Two things make it unique. First, the quiet power of the language, and the author’s control of it.
Second, Hisham Matar’s ability to tell a story that from the first sentence seems inevitable, yet is full of surprises.
‘A curiously engaging story that takes one into a world that seem as simultaneously remote and familiar as something in a dream.
Nuri is a young boy when his mother dies. It seems that nothing will fill the emptiness that her strange death leaves behind in the Cairo apartment he shares with his father. But it is different after he met Mona. When Nuri first sees Mona, sitting in her bright yellow swimsuit by the pool of the Magds Marina holiday resort. The rest of the world vanishes, but it is Nuri’s father with whom Mona falls in love and who she will eventually marry. And their happiness consumes Nuri to the point where he longs to get his father out of the way. However, Nuri will soon regret what he wished for. And, as he and his stepmother’s world is shattered by events beyond their control, they both begin to realize how little they really knew about the man they loved.
Hishman Matar was born in New York City to Libyan parents and spent his childhood first in Tripoli and then in Cairo.
(Amelia.fairney@uk.penguingroup.com, www.penguin.co.uk/pressoffice)
