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Book of the Week

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Serialised book readings, featuring works from various genres

Serialised book readings, featuring works of non-fiction, biography, autobiography, travel, diaries, essays, humour and history

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Book of the Week: The Return

Khalid Abdalla

Hisham Matar

Anna Magnusson

Kirsteen Cameron

Book of the Week: The Return: Episode 5

The Return

Episode 5

BBC Radio 4 - Book of the Week, The Return, Episode 5

Hisham Matar meets Uncle Hmad, who witnessed the massacre at Abu Salim, Tripoli, in 1996.

Returning to Libya after an exile of 30 years, Hisham Matar meets his Uncle Hmad, who witnessed the massacre at Abu Salim prison in June 1996, during which 1,270 prisoners died.

The Libyan novelist Hisham Matar's powerful memoir is a vivid and very moving account of what it's like to be swept up in a situation completely outwith your control - and the ways in which it comes to define your life.

In 1990, Hisham Matar was nineteen when his father, an outspoken critic of the Libyan regime, was kidnapped and taken to prison in Tripoli. He would never see him again. Two decades later, in 2012, after the fall of Qaddafi, Hisham was finally able to return to his homeland after an exile of thirty years. He recounts his return to a country and a family he thought he would never see again and describes the pain of not knowing what happened to his father - it's likely that he died in a massacre at one of Qaddafi's cruellest prisons, Abu Salim in 1996, but he can find no-one able to say absolutely that he did. However, after the fall of the regime, prisons were liberated and the spark of hope that his father had somehow survived slowly petered out. He and his family must come to terms with the fact that they will never know what happened to him.


Reader: Khalid Abdalla

Writer: Hisham Matar

Abridger: Anna Magnusson

Producer: Kirsteen Cameron.

BBC Radio 4

Intelligent speech, the most insightful journalism, the wittiest comedy, the most fascinating features and the most compelling drama and readings anywhere in UK radio.

Powerful memoir of hope and loss by the Booker Prize-nominated Libyan author Hisham Matar.

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