Any book by Hisham Matar simply has to be read. His prose is extraordinary, and he enthralls you in his narrative. This book is about three men, Khalid, Mustafa and Hosam who attend a demonstration outside the Libyan Embassy in London. Men inside the embassy open fire, killing WPC Yvonne Fletcher. Khalid and Mustafa are both injured. Hosam escapes. The book is about their lives being traumatised.
The bullets sounded. Even then I thought, surely, they are just trying to scare us, that I did not even know I was firing into the sky. Except the sound itself - a series of tears like the wind ripping sails - did not seem to be that impressive. What did impress me was the sensation. It literally pressed into me and then ran through me with unremitting force, unquestionable, until it reached the very centre of my brain and halted there for a moment before turning back and scorching outwards, pushing with it everything that I was, everything that I did not know I was to the outer limits. I was now empty and standing, my life reduced to a single unbroken line of a swirl locked inside a child's glass marble. And there it rolled out, that marble, rolled out of me, taking everything with it.
