A fable of loss, and an often troubling meditation on fathers and sons. Matar is writing from the heart
Observer
This beautiful, subtle novel, like the lives of its characters, repays many readings
Helen Dunmore
The Times
Hisham Matar is a master of the evocative; he creates his effects, on the page and on our nervous system with the fewest and most telling words. I was spellbound
Ahdaf Soueif
I was moved and very impressed
Roddy Doyle Each time I had to put it down I couldn't wait to get back to it
Michael Frayn Haunting in every sense. 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
Matar suffuses Nuri's education in love and loss with an erotic frisson and fragile grace that lend the book an inner radiance
Independent
Submerged grief gives this fine novel the mythic inexorability of Greek tragedy
Economist
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
Sunday Telegraph