Shortlisted for both the Man Booker Prize and the Guardian First Book Award, and published here as a Penguin Essential for the first time. Nine-year-old Suleiman is just awakening to the wider world beyond the games on the hot pavement outside his home and beyond the loving embrace of his parents....

Matar was nineteen years old when his father was kidnapped. In the year following he found himself turning to art, particularly the great paintings of the Sienese School. They became a refuge and a way to think about the world outside the urgencies of the present....

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE IN BIOGRAPHY,WINNER OF THE SLIGHTLY FOXED BEST FIRST BIOGRAPHY PRIZE ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES\" TOP 10 BOOKS OF 2016.The Return is at once a universal and an intensely personal tale. It is an exquisite meditation on how history and politics can bear down on an individual life....

In Egypt, Nuri, a teenage boy, falls in love with Mona -the woman his father will marry. Consumed with longing, Nuri wants to get his father out of the way - to take his place in Mona\'s heart. But when his father disappears, Nuri regrets what he wished for....

Nuri is a young boy when his mother dies. It seems that nothing will fill the emptiness that her strange death leaves behind in the Cairo apartment he shares with his father. Until Mona. When Nuri first sees Mona, sitting in her bright yellow swimsuit by the pool of the Magda Marina holiday resort, the rest of the world vanishes. But it is Nuri?...

On a white-hot day in Tripoli, Libya, in the summer of 1979, nine-year-old Suleiman is shopping in the market square with his mother. His father is away on business - but Suleiman is sure he has just seen him, standing across the street......