Preview
  • A Month in Siena

  • By: Hisham Matar
  • Narrated by: Hisham Matar
  • Length: 3 hrs and 24 mins
  • 4.4 out of 5 stars (43 ratings)

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A Month in Siena

By: Hisham Matar
Narrated by: Hisham Matar
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Publisher's summary

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Return comes a profoundly moving contemplation of the relationship between art and life.

Named One of the Best Books of the Year by The Washington Post and Evening Standard

After finishing his powerful 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 he had admired throughout his life, including Duccio and Ambrogio Lorenzetti, evoke earlier engagements he'd had with works by Caravaggio and Poussin, and the personal experiences that surrounded those moments.

Including beautiful full-color reproductions of the artworks, A Month in Siena is about what occurred between Matar, those paintings, and the city. That month would be an extraordinary period in the writer's life: an exploration of how art can console and disturb in equal measure, as well as an intimate encounter with a city and its inhabitants. This is a gorgeous meditation on how centuries-old art can illuminate our own inner landscape - current relationships, long-lasting love, grief, intimacy, and solitude - and shed further light on the present world around us.

Praise for A Month in Siena

"As exquisitely structured as The Return, driven by desire, yearning, loss, illuminated by the kindness of strangers. A Month in Siena is a triumph." (Peter Carey)

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2019 Hisham Matar (P)2019 Random House Audio
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Critic reviews


What listeners say about A Month in Siena

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    5 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars

An atmospheric ramble (in the best sense!)

Having read all of Hisham Matar's books, I enjoyed listening to him read his latest. I'm not sure it can be fully appreciated by those who have not read The Return, his memoir about his search for his father who was kidnapped in 1990 never to be found again. Listening to this latest book is to listen to a sort of post-script, pieces of thoughts and experiences that he shares as one would one's private journal entries. His earlier books teach the reader to become empathetic to him and to regard him as a special friend, a thoughtful and particularly insightful writer, one who has experienced something no human should ever experience. I will always read (or listen to) whatever Hisham Matar writes next. But independent of his personal experience, the first thing that attracted me to his writing, and still continues to in every book of his, is his ability to describe something as mundane as a hot afternoon so evocatively and to write with such depth about humanity. He is one of my favorite writers.

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    1 out of 5 stars
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    1 out of 5 stars

Terrible story

Story was so forced. Hardly anything to do with Siena and its history. A missed opportunity .


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