The author was born in New York City to Libyan parents and spent his childhood first in Tripoli and then Cairo. His father, Jaballa, was a vocal critic of Muammar Gaddafi and he was working in the Libyan delegation to the United Nations when his son Hisham was born.

In 1993, the family moved back to Tripoli but had to flee in 1979 due to harassment and threats by the Gaddafi regime. They went to Cairo where the father became even more vocal in his opposition to the regime.

Hisham was about to follow his elder brother to a school in Switzerland but more threats led the family to send him under an assumed name to a school in England.

In1990, when Hisham was still studying in Britain, his father was abducted in Cairo. In a letter he managed to send to his family in 1996, Jaballa said he had been abducted by the Egyptian secret service and handed over to the Libyans who imprisoned him in the notorious Abu Salim prison in Tripoli. That was the last the family heard from him, despite some reports he had been seen elsewhere.

Hisham is the author of two novels, In the Country of Men and Anatomy of a Disappearance, and a work of non-fiction, The Return.

In the Country of Men was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Guardian First Book Award and the National Critics Book Circle Award in the US and won six international literary awards.

The book follows the plight of Suleiman, a nine-year-old boy living in Tripoli with a father a vocal critic of the Gaddafi regime, harassed by the secret service, and a mother who turns to drink because of the tension and the threats.

Matar's second novel, Anatomy of a Disappearance, tells the story of a boy, Nuri, whose father is abducted by the secret service of his country while he was living in Switzerland.

Hisham has warned readers against reading the story as a thinly disguised autobiography, despite the many similarities.

The Return won a Pulitzer Prize, the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, the Folio Prize and was shortlisted for many other awards including the Baillie Gifford Prize.

The memoire, published in 2016, is Hisham's account of how he returned to Libya after the revolution that removed Gaddafi from power and his fruitless search for his father.

In this most recent book, the author cuts off all connections with his mother country and goes for some weeks to the city which has always been his dream - Siena.

He wanders around its crooked streets, spends many hours inside its art museums, meets people from all over the place, both Italian and foreign, and reflects on all that he has experienced. His wife, Diana, accompanied him on his arrival but then had to return to their house in London.

Left on his own, the author reflects on selected works of art that he comes across. He is struck by meanings hidden in the masterpieces he studies. Rather than a brisk walk around a museum, this meander gets him to notice correlations and significances not otherwise discernible. Among the artists whose select works he studies he includes Duccio di Buoninsegna, Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Michelangelo Pistoletto and Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio.

His days in Siena are not just an art tour. He also meets people, most of them previously unknown, such as a fellow Arab from Jordan and his already integrated children, his teacher of Italian who, being from Calabria, is more near to him than to other Italians around them, and most of all an old friend, living out in the country, with two bathtubs in one room, for her and for her (dead) husband.

One may wonder at the juxtapositioning of people from such different cultures, though this is relatively muted because his Libyan Islamic background is tempered by his years in a Catholic college in Britain which left a deeper impact on him.

The stay in Siena over, he, and hopefully the reader, are left with a far better appreciation of life and art. No clashes of civilizations here. The son of the Gaddafi critic, who disappeared, probably killed, turns a new leaf. He becomes a new European, not a religious fundamentalist, but a cultured, serene man at peace with himself and the world around him.