Hisham Matar’s new memoir is The Return — “a riveting book about love and hope, but also a moving meditation on grief and loss,” wrote Colm Tóibín. “It draws a memorable portrait of a family in exile and manages also to explore the politics of Libya with subtlety and steely intelligence. It is likely to become a classic.”
Scholastique Mukasonga’s Cockroaches recounts her experience fleeing the ethnic violence of Rwanda, capturing not only the suffering brought about by her family’s displacement, but also the beauty of small, quiet moments. “She writes in a luminous and penetrating language, to guard against forgetting,” wrote Le Nouvel Observateur.