Start with In the Country of Men. It is his first novel, it was shortlisted for the Booker in 2006, and it does something the memoir cannot: it puts you inside a nine-year-old in Tripoli in 1979 who understands almost nothing of what is happening around him. Men come to the house. His father is not where he is supposed to be. A neighbour appears on television. The boy narrates all of it accurately and interprets none of it, and that gap is what makes the book unbearable in the right way.
The obvious alternative is to begin with The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between, which is the most decorated thing he has written and won the Pulitzer for autobiography. Resist it. Matar's father, the opposition figure Jaballa Matar, was abducted by the Qaddafi regime and never seen again, and the memoir is the account of going back to Libya after 2011 to find out what happened. If you read it first, the two novels afterwards look like drafts of it. If you read it third, the novels turn retrospectively into something closer to testimony, and the memoir arrives as the fact that was underneath them all along. Same books, entirely different effect.
Start here: the two novels
In the Country of Men first, for the reasons above. It is short, the prose is exact, and it never once explains the politics to you.
Then Anatomy of a disappearance (2011), which circles the same absence from a colder distance: an older narrator, a father who vanishes from a hotel, a boy left to assemble the man from fragments and from other people's discretion. Most readers find it the quieter of the two novels and some find it the more controlled. It gains a great deal from being read second, because you already know how he handles a child who is not being told things.
The memoir
Now The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between (2016). It is the search, the archive, the prison, the relatives, and the specific horror of an answer that never fully arrives. Coming to it with both novels behind you, two things happen. The scenes you thought were invented turn out to have origins, and the restraint of the fiction reads as a decision rather than a style. The book also opens out well past the personal — into the Abu Salim prison and what happened there, and into what a country does with a decade of missing people.
The later work
Finish with My Friends (2024), which moves the preoccupations into a different key. Three Libyan exiles in London across decades, beginning with the 1984 shooting outside the Libyan embassy that left a British police officer dead and scattered everyone who had been demonstrating outside. It is his most spacious book — long, unhurried, and about friendship and exile as much as about loss. It also works perfectly well as a standalone if someone hands it to you first.
Is there an argument for memoir-first?
Yes, and it is worth stating honestly rather than dismissing. If you read The Return first you get the facts in their true shape and the novels then read as the imaginative work he did while the facts were still unavailable to him, which is chronologically what happened. Critics who came to him through the memoir often describe that as the richer route. Our recommendation stays with fiction first, because the novels are built on withheld information and the memoir supplies exactly the information they withhold. You can only lose that once.
A fifth book sits outside this path: A Month in Siena, a short work about looking at paintings, written after the memoir. It is not in our catalogue and it is not part of the sequence, but it is the natural next thing if the four here work for you.
Where to stop
Two books make a complete reading: In the Country of Men and The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between. Everything else deepens rather than extends it.
More reading paths in world literature are on Discover.
Follow the full ordered path here: Hisham Matar in Order: Fiction and Memoir, and Which Comes First.
