Anatomy of a Disappearance, By Hisham Matar

The Libyan writer's debut novel, In the Country of Men, drew on experience (Matar lost his father to Gaddafi's jails) but filtered it through a fine mesh of fictional art.

In its successor, we meet an exiled politician from a nameless Arab nation which has replaced its king with a bizarre tyranny. Kamal Pasha lives with son Nuri in Cairo.

Later, in Geneva, Father vanishes – abducted, it seems, by his foes. For Nuri, this absence squats like "a weight on my chest".

Sculpted in a prose of classical precision, the novel becomes the story not only of Nuri's grief for a ghost but of the four women who dominated their lives.

Nuri's education in love and loss has an erotic frisson and fragile grace that lend the book its slow crescendo of emotion.