This is Hisham Matar's second novel. His first, In the Country of Men, won a ton of international literary awards and was short-listed for the prestigious Man Booker Prize, so when I saw this on the shelf at the library, I thought it might be worth checking out.
Book 15 - Anatomy of a Disappearance - Hisham Matar
The story centers around Uri, a boy who lives with his father, a dissident exiled from his home country. Uri's mother passed a few years earlier, and Uri has never really been able to get over the grief. Now twelve years old, he meets a beautiful young woman and is immediately smitten with her. The twenty-something woman, Mona, falls for the boy's father however, and after a short courtship, they are married and Mona moves in. The boy sees himself as his father's rival for Mona's affection, and Mona loves the boy's attention. The father, seeing what's going on, ships the boy off to boarding school in England.
Shortly after the boy leaves for school, the father disappears under mysterious circumstances. Most of those close to him are convinced that he has been captured/killed by the current regime of his old country in order to silence him. The rest of the book is dedicated to how the people around him deal with the empty space his disappearance leaves. Mona tries to maintain her enchantment on Uri. Uri grows up and eventually faces the truth about his father's secret life, and a rather unexpected truth about his mother as well.
The book has a powerful trance-like quality that draws you in. It is a somewhat timely book too, with the recent events in Libya. The author's father was a Libyan dissident-in-exile who opposed Gaddafi, and like the father in the book, he was kidnapped and returned to Libya when Matar was just a boy. NPR recently did an interview with the Hisham Matar, and if you listen to the audio version, the author reads an excerpt from the book. Here's the link:
http://www.npr.org/2011/09/08/140223701/a-libyan-son-mourns-his-fathers-disappearance
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