Hisham Matar’s The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between is a 2016 memoir that chronicles the author’s physical and emotional journey back to his native Libya in 2012, 33 years after his family went into exile. The book centers on Matar’s quest to uncover the truth about the fate of his father, Jaballa Matar, a prominent political dissident who was kidnapped by Muammar Qaddafi’s regime in 1990 and subsequently disappeared into the infamous Abu Salim prison. Weaving together personal memory, investigative reportage, and historical testimony, the memoir explores themes of The Relationship Between Closure, Grief, and Healing; The Emotional Complexity of Exile and Return; and Art as a Form of Witness and Survival.

Born in New York to Libyan parents, Matar’s life and literary career have been shaped by his family’s experience with political violence and displacement. His acclaimed novels, In the Country of Men (2016) and Anatomy of a Disappearance (2011), also explore themes of loss and exile. The Return received widespread critical acclaim, winning the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Autobiography, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award. The memoir provides a personal lens on the history of Qaddafi’s authoritarian rule, the 1996 Abu Salim prison massacre, and the collective trauma inherited by a nation emerging from decades of state-sponsored terror.

This guide refers to the 2017 Random House Trade Paperback Edition.

Content Warning: The source text and this guide contain depictions of graphic violence, illness or death, and emotional abuse.

Plot Summary

Hisham Matar’s memoir recounts his return to Libya in 2012, 33 years after his family fled the country, and his lifelong search for the truth about his father, Jaballa Matar, a prominent opposition leader kidnapped and imprisoned by the regime of Muammar Qaddafi. The narrative moves between the 2012 trip and decades of earlier events, weaving together family history, political testimony, and personal grief.

The memoir opens in March 2012, with Matar sitting in Cairo International Airport alongside his mother and his wife, Diana, waiting to board a flight to Benghazi. He has not set foot in Libya since 1979, when his family escaped. He reflects on exiled artists who never returned to their homelands and flashes back to October 2011 in New York, when he briefly considered never going back, only to realize that this would mean never thinking about Libya again.

Matar provides context for his family’s displacement. His father, Jaballa, was a Libyan army officer turned diplomat posted to the United Nations in New York, where Matar was born in 1970. The family returned to Tripoli in 1973. By the late 1970s, Jaballa had become one of the most prominent figures opposing the Qaddafi dictatorship, funding an opposition organization with military training camps in Chad and underground cells inside Libya. Matar describes Qaddafi’s campaign to assassinate exiled dissidents across Europe and the terror this brought into his family’s daily life: His brother Ziad was stalked by regime agents at a Swiss boarding school and the young Matar himself, at 12, overheard two men at Geneva airport asking what Jaballa Matar looked like.

In March 1990, Jaballa was kidnapped from the family’s Cairo flat by the Egyptian secret police and delivered to Qaddafi’s regime. He was taken to Abu Salim prison in Tripoli. In the mid-1990s, three letters were smuggled out. In them, Jaballa describes brutal conditions with precise, ironic prose yet reaffirms his pride and will. The family knows Jaballa was in Abu Salim from at least 1990 to April 1996, when he was moved from his cell and never heard from again. In August 2011, when revolutionaries took the prison and all political prisoners were accounted for, Jaballa was not among them. In a basement cell, they found a blind, amnesiac old man whose only possession was a photograph of Jaballa, deepening the mystery without resolving it.

Matar recalls his years at English boarding school under the pseudonym “Bob,” living as someone else to protect his family. He befriended a Libyan boy named Hamza and, on their final night together, revealed his true identity. Both wept but never spoke again.

Returning to the 2012 journey, Matar’s mother implicitly warns him against the obsessive search for his father. When the plane descends, Matar sees the Libyan landscape for the first time in decades, more luminous than memory. In Benghazi, the family is met by Matar’s cousin, Marwan al-Tashani, a judge. Matar soon travels to Ajdabiya, Jaballa’s hometown, to visit his father’s youngest brother, Uncle Mahmoud, who spent 21 years in Abu Salim. Mahmoud was arrested the same week as Jaballa, along with other relatives in the opposition’s underground cells. Released in February 2011, Mahmoud told Matar over the phone not to lose hope.

Mahmoud recounts his first days in prison: arriving blindfolded and discovering Jaballa held in a nearby cell but failing to recognize his brother’s voice for weeks until Jaballa identified himself through an old childhood joke. Matar recalls his parents’ Cairo dinner parties, where his mother cooked and his father recited Bedouin poetry in the alam form, an elegiac tradition signifying knowledge gained through loss. 

An elderly relative named Muftah visits and sits beside Matar, repeating the same phrase over and over. After Muftah leaves, Mahmoud reveals that Muftah witnessed the death of Jaballa’s older brother, Salah, killed by a landmine at age 11. After, Matar traces his grandfather, Hamed’s, role in the resistance against the Italian occupation under Omar al-Mukhtar, a childhood memory of the old man revealing a bullet still lodged beneath his collarbone becoming an emblem of unresolved pain carried across generations.

The memoir follows Izzo, Uncle Mahmoud’s son. A photograph from 1989 shows baby Izzo on Jaballa’s knee; six months later, both Jaballa and Mahmoud were arrested. Izzo grew up without his father, joined the 2011 revolution after Mahmoud’s release, and fought across Libya. On August 23, 2011, Izzo and his brother, Hamed, stormed Qaddafi’s compound, Bab al-Azizia, believing they would find Jaballa alive. A sniper killed Izzo. His last words were that he wanted to be buried beside his fallen comrade, Marwan al-Towmi.

At a literary event in the Benghazi library, Matar is presented with two short stories his father published in 1957 as an 18-year-old student. Both feature values demonstrated by Jaballa and Matar throughout their lives, with Matar recognizing a character’s dedication to surviving as the belief that has guided him through his darkest moments.

Since Matar began his search, it has been implied that Jaballa died in the Abu Salim massacre in which 1,270 prisoners were killed, though this was never confirmed. After exhausting other options, he accepts this is likely true, setting the date of his father’s death as June 29, 1996. He reflects on his daily practice of visiting a single painting at a museum for months at a time, a habit he started when he was 19. Checking his 1996 diary, he discovers that on June 29, he suddenly switched to viewing Manet’s The Execution of Maximilian, a fragmented painting of a political execution. The coincidence deeply unsettles him.

A major section recounts the public campaign Matar launched in 2009-2010 after a former prisoner claimed to have seen Jaballa alive in 2002. PEN International organized an open letter published in The Times; Nobel Peace Prize winner Desmond Tutu issued an unprecedented public criticism of Qaddafi; and the case was raised in the House of Lords. Over 13 months of negotiations with Seif el-Islam Qaddafi, the dictator’s son and self-styled reformer, Matar received only hints that his father was dead. On February 20, 2011, as the Libyan uprising erupted, Seif appeared on television threatening violence, and the mask of reformer fell away.

Back in Benghazi, Matar meets the former prisoner whose sighting fueled the campaign. The man fails to recognize Jaballa from a photograph, admitting the identification was secondhand, disillusioning Matar. At the Benghazi Courthouse, Matar finds a memorial room displaying passport photos of the 1,270 massacre victims. He scans the rows for his father but does not find him.

In Ajdabiya, Matar hears Uncle Hmad Khanfore’s eyewitness account of the massacre. After prisoner resistance over poor conditions and treatment, intelligence chief Abdullah Senussi negotiated with prisoners, promised reforms, then separated them. Seconds later came an explosion and sustained gunfire lasting two hours. The dead were left for days; months later, the bodies were exhumed, the bones ground to dust, and the powder poured into the sea. Jaballa was in a separate wing at the time, hence why nobody can confirm his inclusion in the massacre.

Uncle Mahmoud shows Matar a stolen pillowcase picked apart into a single sheet of linen, covered on both sides with poems and letters to his children, concealed by sewing the fabric into his underpants. He says it may be the only literature to survive Abu Salim. The memoir closes with Matar carrying a tray of yoghurt milk, date syrup, and bread out to the patio, where Uncle Mahmoud and his children wait.