Discoveries

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In the Country of Men

A Novel

Hisham Matar

The Dial Press: 246 pp., $22

THE first things one notices are the quality of light -- bright, glaring, shadow-casting -- and the constant presence of the sea in the corner of the scenes. Like the 9-year-old narrator of Hisham Matar’s “In the Country of Men,” a reader looks instinctively for places to hide. But the novel is set in Moammar Kadafi’s Libya in 1979, and there is nowhere to hide. Matar re-creates a child’s desperate need to understand what is going on around him -- the whispering, the phone calls, the cars of the Revolutionary Committee thugs. The boy, Suleiman, learns to connect these with the disappearances of his friend’s father and other family members. He comes slowly to understand that his own father is not away on a business trip but is in hiding, that the “medicine” his mother takes each day is alcohol and that his family is in grave danger.

He sees his father in the street: “Two dark lenses curved like the humpbacks of turtles over his eyes. The sky, the sun and the sea were painted by God in colors we could all point at and say the sea is turquoise, the sun banana, the sky blue. Sunglasses are terrible, I thought, because they change all of this and keep those who wear them at a distance.” Even if we did not grow up in Libya, we can remember what it was like to piece the world together, story by story, prisoners of Scheherazade. Suleiman must rely on his frightened, embittered mother to tell him where his father is and what he’s doing. And he feels responsible for her, feels he must protect her. He watches mock trials and televised executions. He hides when the thugs knock on his door. He is tricked into betraying others. Neighbors vanish “like a grain of sand in water.” The heat presses on the roof tiles and the mulberry bushes as the author draws the oxygen from the pages.

“In the Country of Men” was short-listed for both the Man Booker Prize for Fiction and the Guardian First Book Award last year. Matar is a careful, controlled writer. His restraint -- the spaces and the light between his words -- make reading his work a physical as well as an emotional experience.

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The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears

A Novel

Dinaw Mengestu

Riverhead Books: 240 pp., $22.95

SEPHA STEPHANOS owns a convenience store in a marginal neighborhood in Washington, D.C. He has lived almost two decades in America, having fled Ethiopia after seeing the police beat his father to death in front of him and his mother and brother. Stephanos’ father was killed because the police had found political pamphlets in the house -- pamphlets that belonged to Stephanos.

This is the background of pain that makes the United States look like the Promised Land. Dinaw Mengestu’s “The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears” opens as two friends of Stephanos, from different parts of Africa, meet him at the store at the end of the workday to drink, exchange stories and remember Africa. They are a family. They help lift one another’s spirits and provide solace in hard times.

Stephanos writes often to his mother and brother, back in Africa. He watches as his neighborhood gentrifies and families are evicted. He receives a notice that he must vacate his store because he has not paid his rent on time. A white woman named Judith and her 11-year-old daughter, Naomi (whose skin is closer in tone to Stephanos’ than her mother’s), move into the four-story brick town house next door and renovate it.

Mengestu -- who was born in Ethiopia in 1978, during Mengistu Haile Mariam’s Red Terror, and whose family immigrated to the United States two years later -- weaves families out of nothing. This is his particular magic. A neighbor’s kindness, a friend’s concern, drain loneliness and fear from situations that threaten us all -- failure to pay your debts, failure to adjust, failure to take on any responsibility because of your fear. Simply describing a table, with three chairs, three friends and a map of Africa, Mengestu creates a sense of home and belonging.