Cathy calls this book, "Gorgeous, exquisite, moving, timely, timeless, sweet, heartbreaking.

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 they meet Mona, sitting in her yellow swimsuit by the pool of the Magda Marina hotel. As soon as Nuri sees her, the rest of the world vanishes. But it is Nuri’s father with whom Mona falls in love and whom she eventually marries. And their happiness consumes Nuri to the point where he wishes his father would disappear.

Nuri will, however, soon regret what he wished for. His father, long a dissident in exile from his homeland, is taken under mysterious circumstances. And, as the world that Nuri and his stepmother share is shattered by events beyond their control, they begin to realize how little they knew about the man they both loved.

Anatomy of a Disappearance is written with all the emotional precision and intimacy that have won Hisham Matar tremendous international recognition. In a voice that is delicately wrought and beautifully tender, he asks: When a loved one disappears, how does their absence shape the lives of those who are left?



Cathy loves this book, saying:
 

"An 11 year old boy and his father, lost and lonely since the recent death of the boy's mother meet Mona, a beautiful young Arab-English woman at a resort on the coast of Egypt.  Two years later, Nuri, the boy, and Mona, now his stepmother, learn of the mysterious disappearance of Kamal Pasha el-Alfi  while breakfasting at the Montreux Palace on Lake Geneva.  Exotic locales underscore the essential tragedy of a family without its homeland, a family built around many complicated lies, and a boy seeking answers to his father's enigmatic life and unsolved disappearance.  Hasham Matar's writing is clean and spare and spears your heart."