“[A] beautiful second novel…. However steamy or tumultuous the events Matar describes, his prose is unwaveringly cool and elegant.” —The Globe and Mail
“For Western readers, what often seemed lacking [in the coverage of the Arab Spring] was an authentic interpreter and witness, someone who could speak across cultures and make us feel the abundant miseries that fueled the revolt. No one plays this role, in my view, as powerfully, as Hisham Matar … Matar writes in English, in extraordinarily powerful and densely evocative prose: he seems uniquely poised to play the role of literary ambassador between two worlds … Anatomy of a Disappearance is studded with little jewels of perception, deft metaphors and details that illuminate character or set a scene.” —The New York Times
“Matar’s romantic style is well suited to this story, inspired in part by his own loss. But one suspects that if the tragedies of his life were less obviously dramatic, he would still find a way to make the telling of them beautiful.” —Gazette (Montreal)
“Haunting in every sense, Anatomy of a Disappearance is 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.” —Sunday Times (U.K.)
“This beautiful, subtle novel, like the lives of its characters, repays many readings.” —The Times (U.K.)
“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.” —Telegraph (U.K.)
“A tenderly written novel with Shakespearean themes, it can be read as a deeply personal account of the losses that tyranny and exile produce.” —Times Literary Supplement (U.K.)
“Probably represents the most important artistic response yet to the trauma of Arab dictatorship … Matar is beginning to do for the Arab experience what the likes of Salman Rushdie have done for the sub-continent.” —The Times (U.K.)
“Submerged grief gives this fine novel the mythic inexorability of Greek tragedy.” —The Economist
“A poignant exploration of the half-state between grief and hope.” —New Statesman
“The ability of fiction to convey injustice with a unique emotional power means that novels can change history … Mr. Matar is the writer who has done most to convey the reality of Col. Gaddafi’s Libya.” —Financial Times
“The novel is all the more powerful for the restraint with which the author writes of a son’s loss and longing for his father. Fascinating, too, in its perspective on the changing face of the Arab world.” —Daily Mail (U.K.)
“Beautifully crafted … as much about how a person vanishes as it is how the memory of a vanished person is preserved and transformed.” —Financial Times
“Sculpted in a prose of clutter-free, classical precision…. Marked by a brooding and rather sinister sensuality … Matar suffuses Nuri’s education in love and loss with an erotic frisson and fragile grace that lend the book an inner radiance.” —Independent (U.K.)
“A tightly coiled, masterfully controlled narrative…. Matar has a beautifully economical style, and a wonderful way with physical detail…. Matar deals with [Nuri’s] obsession with a great, tender psychological acuity. Anatomy of a Disappearance is a testament to the terrible human cost of unjust government in the Arab world. It is, by design, an artful novel.” —The Independent on Sunday (U.K.)
“Anatomy of a Disappearance … has a dreamlike quality, in spite of Matar’s cool and lapidary prose. It is a fable of loss, and an often troubling meditation on fathers and sons. Hisham Matar is writing from the heart.” —Observer (U.K.)
“Two things stood out as I read Anatomy of a Disappearance. First, there was the quiet power of the language, and the author’s control of it. Second, there was Hisham Matar’s ability to tell a story that from the first sentence seems inevitable, yet is full of surprise.” —Roddy Doyle
“A curiously engaging story that takes one into a world that seems as simultaneously remote and familiar as something in a dream.” —Michael Frayn
