Penguin Essentials: In the Country of Men

‘I am recalling now the last summer before I was sent away. It was 1979 and the sun was everywhere. Tripoli lay brilliant and still beneath it.’

Nine-year-old Suleiman is just an ordinary boy living in an ordinary house with ordinary parents. Or so he thinks. Then one day when his father is away on business – as he is regularly – Suleiman sees his father standing in the market square wearing sun glasses, and suddenly the safe ordered world he thought he knew is shattered.

In his father’s continuing absence, Suleiman turns to his mother and learns of the wider world, of what it means to live under a brutal dictator whose agents follow your every move, listen to your every phone call, and take husbands and fathers from families any time they wish . . .