Product Description
A Month in Siena
Author: Hisham Matar
Format: Paperback
From the Pulitzer Prize-Winning and Man Booker-Shortlisted Author
'Sparkles with brilliant observations on art and architecture, friendship and loss' — Guardian
'Everybody should get to spend a month with Mr. Matar, looking at paintings' — Zadie Smith, Wall Street Journal, Books of the Year
Matar was nineteen years old when his father was kidnapped. In the year following he found himself turning to art, particularly the great paintings of the Sienese School. They became a refuge and a way to think about the world outside the urgencies of the present.
A quarter of a century later, having found no trace of his father, Matar finally visits the birthplace of those paintings. A Month in Siena is the encounter between the writer and the city. It is an immersion in painting, a consideration of love, grief and a profoundly moving contemplation of the relationship between art and life.
'A dazzling exploration of art's impact on his life and writing, and a moving contemplation of grief' — Financial Times
'I can think of no better expression of the humane than this economical, modest, yet altogether breathtaking book' — New Statesman, Books of the Year
'Bewitching, intensely moving' — The Economist, Books of the Year
About the Author
Hisham Matar was born in New York to Libyan parents, spent his childhood in Tripoli and Cairo and has lived most of his life in London. His memoir The Return received a Pulitzer Prize in 2017. He is also the author of In the Country of Men, shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Anatomy of a Disappearance and A Month in Siena. His most recent novel, My Friends, won the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction 2024, was longlisted for the Booker Prize, and nominated for the National Book Award. His work has been translated into over thirty languages.
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