In the Country of Men Hisham Matar

This is a powerful first book about Qaddafi’s repressive Libya, seen through the eyes of a nine year old boy, Suleiman. The book is focused on the private world of his father, his mother and his friends in the neighborhood. But this world becomes public when his friend Kareem’s father is imprisoned by the government and then hung in a basket ball court among a cheering crowd.

Kamila Shamsie reviews the book in the Guardian here.

And whatever his subject, Matar writes beautifully. In describing the world of seas and mulberries he is a sensualist; when writing of executions and arrests he is a nuanced observer with a gift for conveying both absurdity and raw emotion. His description of a public execution is an exceptional piece of writing - he is not afraid to bring in details that seem entirely incongruous with the setting, yet serve to give it an air of greater verisimilitude. A man trying to resist being taken to the gallows reminds Suleiman of "the way a shy woman would resist her friends' invitation to dance, pulling her shoulders up to her ears and waving her index finger nervously in front of her mouth". The scene is by turns absurd, painful and terrifying - and, with consummate confidence, at the crucial moment of the hanging Matar is able to step back from the detailed descriptions and evocative imagery to tell us, simply and chillingly: "Everybody seemed happy."

The writing is emotionally honest, with Suleiman questioning his own actions often.
I.H.T. has a review by Lorraine Adams
here.

The boy interrogates himself after each episode, weak with shame. But then morning comes, what he experienced recedes, and its lessons fail to take hold. Gradually, we begin to apprehend the ways in which any despotic system is like any boy's inner life. Short-lived in their affections, easily offended, impressed with showboating stadiums of cheering automatons, blindly vicious, the boy and the system embody a topsy-turvy puerility. As in Orwell's famous formulation — "war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength" — the world has lost its definitions, or, in Matar's formulation, it has yet to learn them.

Ultimately, this is a novel most concerned with relationships between people - friends, spouses, comrades and, particularly, parents and their children. Matar movingly charts the ways in which love endures in situations of great repression, but also shows how repression threatens everything, even love, putting relationships under a strain that can be unendurable.