Countries don't come any more alien than present-day Libya. Years of censorship have insured that the bulk of our knowledge comes from maps and CIA estimates: It forms a sparsely populated collar on the African continent, is padded by Egypt and Algeria, was once ruled by the Ottomans and later, briefly, by the Italians. Since September 1969 it has been patrolled by the henchmen of military dictator Muammar al-Qaddafi. His adventurist politics and stubborn pursuit of WMDs resulted in a costly isolation from the international community that ended only a few years ago when he extended an olive branch to the West, gloating over what has been called the "Libyan Model" of dialogue and negotiation. Sanctions were relaxed, though fears were not; Qaddafi is still alive, hatted darkly, his tinted aviators watching from propaganda billboards across the country.

Hisham Matar's powerful debut novel, which was shortlisted for the 2006 Man Booker Prize, tries to pry the lid off this quietly simmering caldron. In the Country of Men is set in 1970s Tripoli, "brilliant and still" under the sun, dotted with "occasional gray patches of mercy carved into the white of everything." We are listening to the voice of 9-year-old Suleiman, Slooma to his beloved father, a prodemocracy dissident constantly on the run from the authorities. Anxious Suleiman spends his days with his mother, who paces the house frantically smoking cigarettes and makes frequent trips to the baker for a "medicine" drink that is banned in the country and must be hidden under her seat on the drive home. At traffic signals Suleiman and his mother have to avoid eye contact with government personnel: "Everyone knows you mustn't overtake a Revolutionary Committee car, and if you have to, then you must do it discreetly, without showing any pleasure in it."

This intimate tone ("everyone knows") is a clever trick. Suleiman speaks as if to someone familiar with his surroundings and is therefore the best kind of tour guide: A neighbor being dragged out of his house by government operatives is eerily described as wearing "that strange embarrassed smile of his." He is manhandled and thrown into a car that has been waiting outside his house like "a giant dead moth in the sun." Another neighbor, Ustath Jafer, is known to be an "Antenna," a government spy. In front of his wife you must say things like, "How wonderful the revolution has been for this country!"

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