Amal posts photographs of her brother Izzo on Facebook nearly every day. The images trace his life from curious child to freedom fighter during the 2011 revolution. Over six months of war, his expression shifts from earnest to fatigued. Before the fighting, Izzo was a final-year civil engineering student. In early February 2011, Uncle Mahmoud and other political prisoners were released as the dictatorship attempted to prevent uprisings. Two weeks later, revolt erupted across Libya, including in Ajdabiya, which changed hands multiple times. Uncle Mahmoud refused to evacuate, wanting to stay with Izzo, who was fighting near their home.

Once Ajdabiya was secured, Izzo traveled to Brega and then by fishing boat to Misrata, where fierce battles raged. The revolutionaries blocked Qaddafi’s tanks by filling trucks with sand and parking them across the main streets. During lulls, Izzo returned home. On his last visit, he told his mother he believed he would find his Uncle Jaballa alive in Bab al-Azizia, Qaddafi’s compound in Tripoli.

In Misrata, Izzo became inseparable from Marwan al-Towmi, a 29-year-old economics graduate from Benghazi. Photographs show them in a dilapidated building, taking turns sleeping and keeping watch.

Matar recalls his own work during the revolution, telephoning fighters and witnesses across Libya to supply information to journalists. In early June 2011, he spoke to a diplomat-turned-fighter in Zliten who reported burying 22 dead in the town square. A week later, Qaddafi’s forces returned, exhumed the graves, and burned the bodies. The diplomat connected the narrator with an elderly man who had watched from his window. The old man revealed he was hiding his own son’s decomposing body in his room, as it had been there for three days and he feared touching it.

A month later, in July 2011, Izzo and Marwan traveled from Misrata and slipped into Zliten. A video shot on Izzo’s mobile phone on July 12—Marwan’s 30th birthday—shows them climbing a building’s staircase. Marwan carries a Kalashnikov and the revolutionary flag. On the roof, he tears down two small green flags of Qaddafi’s regime and raises the red, black, and green revolutionary banner. They kick in an apartment door, find pro-Qaddafi slogans written in red lipstick on the walls, and insist on writing “Libya is Free” before fleeing as enemy forces approach.

Thirty-eight days later, on August 19, Marwan was shot multiple times in Zliten. Izzo rushed him to a hospital, where he died. Honoring a promise they had made to each other, Izzo buried Marwan in Misrata, where they first met, then continued fighting toward Tripoli.

On August 23, Izzo reunited with his older brother, Hamed, at the gates of Bab al-Azizia in Tripoli. The brothers, among the first to breach the compound, searched for their Uncle Jaballa but found the complex empty. A sniper fired a single shot that struck Izzo in the forehead. The sniper fired again, wounding Hamed in the leg and lung. Hamed carried Izzo to safety, but Izzo died in the hospital that evening. His last words requested burial beside Marwan in Misrata.

Hamed recovered and returned to fighting, refusing his parents’ pleas to come home. After Tripoli fell, he came back to Ajdabiya suffering nightmares in which Izzo professed being happier in the afterlife. When sent to Turkey for surgery on his leg, Hamed instead crossed into Syria to join the resistance against Bashar al-Assad. He was wounded, recovered, and eventually returned home with his parents. Matar recalls seeing a photo of Izzo taken just after his death, disturbed by the color of blood or disinfectant on his face.

Matar says goodbye to Uncle Mahmoud’s household and drives to Benghazi. The evening light stretches across the desert, which shows unusual greenery from an exceptionally wet winter. As he travels, he reflects on his inner child and with its longing for the sea.

In Benghazi, Matar meets his cousin, Marwan al-Tashani, at the hotel. Marwan, once a prosecutor who could barely wake before noon, has transformed into an energetic human rights campaigner, founding the Libyan Judges’ Organization. Matar recalls their first reunion in Cairo in 1992 at his brother, Ziad’s, wedding, after 13 years apart. During the 1990s, when Marwan frequently visited Cairo, political distance grew between them because Marwan was cautious about criticizing the regime in Libya.

The narrative shifts to February 2011, when Marwan and other lawyers and judges staged a protest on the Benghazi Courthouse steps after a human rights lawyer was arrested. What began as a symbolic gesture escalated when families of deceased prisoners joined them, and the gathering swelled into thousands. On February 17, when authorities attacked and killed demonstrators, the uprising intensified rather than retreating.

Marwan takes the narrator to meet Ahmed al-Faitouri, an author and editor who plans to launch a new newspaper. Ahmed spent 10 years in prison after the regime trapped young writers at a 1978 book festival and arrested them. He has already arranged a public event for Matar in two days. Marwan laughs, declaring himself Matar’s publicist and calling journalists to announce the visit.

Matar meets more relatives, experiencing what he describes as a state where time and space feel unsteady. He wanders Benghazi’s streets, noting the city’s punitive neglect under the regime but also sensing the possibility of making it his home. He meets his wife, Diana, at Café Vittoria on the seafront.

He reflects on Benghazi’s layered architectural history. The waterfront, designed by the Italians to erase Arab and Muslim character, features the Benghazi Cathedral, where two students were hanged in 1977 for opposing political interference in universities. He recalls researching the cathedral’s architect, Guido Ferrazza, as a student in 1992. Ferrazza came from a small Alpine village, worked across Europe, South America, and colonial Africa, was brought to Benghazi in 1927 by Fascist governor Attilio Teruzzi, and eventually fled to England during World War II. After the war, he attempted to emigrate to Argentina but returned to Italy, where he died in a train derailment in 1961.

Sitting with Diana, Matar contemplates living in Benghazi part of the year, feeling a renewed childhood conviction that the world was available to him.

The following morning, Maher Bushrayda, a cousin and former political prisoner now working in the new secret service, visits. Maher was arrested in 1977 and spent 11 years in prison. He promises to help Matar find information about his father, speaking in veiled terms that suggest Jaballa is dead. During their conversation, Matar feels his father’s presence behind him, beckoning him to stop searching. After Maher leaves, Matar observes his stifled gait common to former political prisoners.

Walking along the seafront, the narrator watches a boy on a quad bike and children playing, observing ordinary moments of daily life.

Matar, his mother, and Diana arrive at Benghazi’s dilapidated public library for his event. The building appears abandoned, with empty shelves and broken blinds. His father’s friends, elderly men in suits, greet him. A man in the front row holds a large leather-bound book on his trembling lap, gazing at the narrator with tear-filled eyes. Marwan plays a slideshow of family photographs set to music.

During the intermission, the old man approaches and reveals he was Jaballa’s college friend. He presents the bound volume: complete issues of The Scholar, a literary journal they edited together at the Teachers’ College of Cyrenaica in 1957. Matar is astonished to discover two short stories authored by his father, whom he never knew wrote fiction. His mother confirms she knew nothing of this either. They decide to open the second half with a reading of “In the Stillness of the Night: A Libyan Tale,” which depicts Libyans defeating Italian invaders. A line in the story echoes language from Jaballa’s prison letters.

During the question period, audience members share memories of the narrator’s grandfather and father. A man then stands to pay tribute to the narrator’s mother, Fawzia Tarbah. He reveals that in the 1970s, she opened her Tripoli home to mothers of political prisoners, housing them for months, cooking with them for the entire prison wing, and sending books and supplies to their sons. His own mother was among those she helped. The room gives Fawzia a standing ovation. Later, she downplays the story.

Unable to sleep in his Benghazi hotel, Matar reads his father’s second short story, “A Struggle with Fate,” about a boy who loses everything but resolves to “work and survive” (124). He recognizes this phrase as an internal mantra that has guided him for 25 years, as if his father, writing at 18, had planted a message for his future son.

Matar reflects on his grandfather, Hamed Matar, who lived between 103 and 112 years, born somewhere between 1876 and 1885 in Ottoman Libya. He recalls childhood visits to his grandfather’s minimalist, maze-like house in Ajdabiya. Once, his parents convinced the reluctant Hamed to visit Tripoli, but he remained silent and tense until they returned to the open desert, finally relaxing. Another time, young Matar asked about his war wound. Hamed unbuttoned his shirt to show where an Italian bullet entered beneath his collarbone but remained lodged in his body for the rest of his life.

Matar examines Libya’s scarce historical record, detailing the brutal Italian occupation that began in 1911. Between 1911 and 1916, 5,000 of Tripoli’s 30,000 inhabitants—the city’s elite—were deported to Italian island prisons, where most perished. Under Mussolini’s Fascist regime, the destruction intensified. Tribal populations were marched to concentration camps. Danish journalist Knud Holmboe documented these camps in his book Desert Encounter (1931), describing starving, ragged internees. The poet Rajab Abuhweish, imprisoned at El-Agheila camp, composed his famous poem “I Have No Illness But” from memory, as prisoners were forbidden writing materials. Omar al-Mukhtar led the resistance until his capture and execution in 1931, after which many fighters fled to Egypt.

However, Grandfather Hamed fled to Alexandria in 1919, 12 years before al-Mukhtar’s death. Family stories claim he assassinated a high-ranking Italian officer and had to escape. He became a successful tradesman in Alexandria but was arrested in the early 1930s and handed to Italian authorities. The family held a funeral, believing him dead. However, he miraculously escaped Italy and returned to Libya. Historian Nicola Labanca suggests he was likely given a choice to die or return to Libya under surveillance.

When Grandfather Hamed died in late 1989, Jaballa fell into profound grief. A few months later, Jaballa disappeared. Before his kidnapping, he confided that he had made secret, dangerous trips across the Egyptian-Libyan border to visit his aging father. His reassuring demeanor actually indicated that, with his own father dead, Jaballa felt free to take even greater risks, something the narrator missed at the time.

Matar reflects on the nature of absence, arguing that his father is at the same time dead and alive. After returning from Libya, he flew to Rome to see a Titian exhibition. He stood before The Martyrdom of Saint Lawrence, a massive painting depicting a man being burned alive, surrounded by torturers. The image provoked imaginings of his father’s final moments.

Since 19, when he lost his father, Matar has maintained a practice of visiting one painting repeatedly—sometimes for a year—rather than overwhelming himself by touring entire galleries. He describes Abu Salim prison’s architecture, built from prefabricated concrete walls with circular holes that prisoners discovered and used to pass books between cells. Matar admits his father might’ve been killed in the June 29, 1996 massacre, when 1,270 prisoners were executed in Abu Salim’s courtyards. Over 25 years, Matar has pursued all information about the prison and met former inmates around the world, including traveling to Oklahoma. 

In 1993, the family received their first smuggled letter from Jaballa, which held a warning not to reveal its existence to anyone else, disturbing the family. In October 1995, Jaballa wrote asking London-based dissident Saber Majid for an $8,000 loan for a fellow prisoner’s family. Majid published the letter in a newspaper without giving the money. A former cellmate later told Ziad that Jaballa was tortured for three days but refused to give names.

In Benghazi, Matar met Ehlayyel Bejo, a poet imprisoned at 19 who spent 17 years in Abu Salim. Ehlayyel became close to Jaballa and, along with cousin Nasser al-Tashani, risked his life smuggling letters to the family. Jaballa never revealed their names under torture.

Matar again considers the 1996 Abu Salim massacre, during which numerous freed prisoners claim Jaballa was killed, but none can confirm seeing him. Matar admits his father likely died, then, on June 29. He recently searched his old notebooks and found his diary from that date. The entry notes he could not get out of bed until noon, despite being an early riser, and then visited the National Gallery. He switched from viewing the painting he had for six months to visiting Édouard Manet’s The Execution of Maximilian, a fragmented depiction of a political execution. This unsettling coincidence has forever altered his relationship with Manet’s work.