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 *
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 -- Gideon Rachman * Financial Times *
This beautiful, subtle novel, like the lives of its characters, repays many readings -- Helen Dunmore * The Times *
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 *
A curiously engaging story that takes one into a world that seems simultaneously remote and familiar as something in a dream. Each time I had to put it down I couldn't wait to get back to it * Michael Frayn *
A tenderly written novel with Shakespearean themes, it can be read as a deeply personal account of the losses that tyranny and exile produce * TLS *
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 -- Sathnam Sanghera * The Times *
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 surprises * Roddy Doyle *
It 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 *
Submerged grief gives this fine novel the mythic inexorability of Greek tragedy * Economist *
A poignant exploration of the half-state between grief and hope * New Statesman *
A tightly coiled, masterfully controlled narrative . . . A testament to the terrible human cost of unjust government in the Arab world * Independent on Sunday *
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 *
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 -- Boyd Tonkin * Independent *
