In 1990 Matar’s father was kidnapped by Gaddafi’s thugs and imprisoned in Tripoli; for a while his family had letters from him, then the letters stopped. Hisham Matar’s characters find themselves at the centre of historic, headline-making events. Matar’s previous novels In the Country of Men and Anatomy of a Disappearance fictionalise this subject of the imprisoned or vanished father. In London, on April 17, 1984, two Libyan students, Khaled and Mustafa, attend a demonstration against Gaddafi’s regime outside the Libyan Embassy, which ends with gunmen in an upper window opening fire onto the crowd. A policewoman is killed; Khaled and Mustafa are among those wounded.

Source: Libya Today February 07, 2024 06:01 UTC