After finishing his memoir THE RETURN, Hisham Matar, seeking solace and pleasure, traveled to Siena, Italy. Always finding comfort and clarity in great art, Matar immersed himself in eight significant works from the Sienese School of painting, which flourished from the 13th to the 15th centuries. Artists whom he had admired throughout his life, such as Duccio and Ambrogio Lorenzetti, evoke earlier engagements he has had with works by Caravaggio and Poussin, and the personal experiences that surrounded those moments. Complete with gorgeous full-color reproductions of the artworks, A MONTH IN SIENA is about what occurred between Matar, those paintings and the city.

When Hisham Matar was a 19-year-old university student in England, his father was kidnapped. One of the Qaddafi regime’s most prominent opponents in exile, he was held in a secret prison in Libya. Hisham would never see him again. But he never gave up hope that his father might still be alive. Twenty-two years later, after the fall of Qaddafi, the prison cells are empty and there is no sign of Jaballa Matar. Hisham returns with his mother and wife to the homeland he never thought he’d go back to again. THE RETURN is the story of what he found there.

Nuri is a young boy when his mother dies and nothing can fill the emptiness that her death causes within him and his father. Until they meet Mona and Nuri falls madly in love, but it's Nuri's father that Mona loves and eventually marries and their happiness consumes and tortures Nuri. When Nuri's father is kidnapped, they both realize how little they know this man.