In the Country of Men, (Paperback)

from tldegray

In 1979, the protagonist of In the Country of Men, Suleiman, was nine years old. I had just turned ten. This colored my reading of this book because I remember Qaddafi, or at least the news reports and talk about him, and I couldn't help but compare what I knew with what Suleiman experienced, and...

from Lukerik

This is particularly good. He's obviously taken a lot of care over it and has ornamented the prose, especially at the beginning. It's not a particularly nice book. I googled the author and his father has been abducted by the old Libyan government so I didn't think it was going to be lambs and flo...

from crimson-tide

A very well written and poignant look through the eyes of a nine year old boy growing up during the violent and repressive Libyan dictatorship. He's lonely and confused, not understanding the world, his father's absences or his mother's moods and alcoholic episodes; longing for his parent's love ...

from LukeS

In "In the Country of Men" Hisham Matar gives us an apparently autobiographical account of a boy's experiences after the coup which put Qadhafi in power in Libya. We see the world through the eyes and heart of a nine-year-old boy, who watches his parents' involvement, along with that of his frien...

from dchaikin

There's a lot to like in this starkly vivid and too close to real novel about Libya circa 1979. The imagery in the first few paragraphs of the blindly white sunlight and the turquoise ocean in Tripoli is memorable in itself. The author, Hisham Matar, is Libyan, but was born in New York, the son o...