In search of the truth of a kidnapped father

In 1979, novelist Hisham Matar's family was forced to flee Libya. Matar was only a child at the time; his father was one of the most outspoken critics of Qaddafi's regime.

Ten years later, Matar's father disappeared from the family's adopted city of Cairo. He was kidnapped, taken back to a secret prison in Libya.

Matar was a college student at the time of the disappearance. He spent the next two decades imagining, and trying not to imagine, his father's fate. In his new memoir, "The Return," he describes landing in Libya 22 years after the kidnapping to search for what really happened.

"When we leave a place or we leave a person, the thing that we like to think is they remain the same," Matar told MPR New host Kerri Miller. "But it seems to me that reality is not like that at all: Places change and people change and we change, and over time something develops."

After the fall of Qaddafi, the secret prison cells were emptied, but his father was still nowhere to be found. Questions remain unanswered.

"Paradoxically, my book is about facts — it's about the things that I know — but it's also about the gaps, the black holes that can't be filled regardless of how hard I've tried," Matar said. "I don't have the information to place in all the gaps in the puzzle. My imagination and my emotional life attempt to fill it."

For the full conversation with Hisham Matar on "The Return," use the audio player above.