The irony starts with the title: Hisham Matar's debut novel might claim to draw our attention to men, but its gaze is trained almost unswervingly on a boy and a woman. It is suburban Tripoli in 1979 and nine-year-old Suleiman and his mother, Najwa, cleave to each other through the stiflingly hot days and nights when their paterfamilias is away on business.

Their relationship is gripping and unsettling: Mama's frequently recurring 'illness', her attacks related to her furtive recourse to a bottle of 'medicine', prompt in her son a mixture of stricken concern, barely suppressed anger and painfully harboured love. Najwa's repeated recitation of her traumatic adolescence - married off to Suleiman's father when she was 14, as punishment for a perceived rebellion - haunts her son, who dreams of himself as her rescuer just as, every day, he rescues her from drunken desperation.

But soon, both have even more agonising events to face. A neighbour disappears; men roar up in cars and search houses; Suleiman wakes up one morning to find his mother and a friend burning his father's beloved books and hastily hanging a picture of 'the Guide' - Muammar Gadaffi - on the wall. Betrayal is in the air and, when it becomes apparent that Suleiman's father has joined the ranks of the missing, it comes to seem like the only way to survive.

Matar's stunning narrative, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker prize last year, fights shy of a straightforward rendition of the obvious horrors of Libyan life under a dictatorship, although it contains plenty of nightmarishly surreal scenes and grisly details. But in situating his story in a claustrophobically domestic setting, the writer makes his portrayal of oppression deeper and more resonant, intensifying the themes of collusion, treachery, mutual dependency and thwarted freedom by giving them both private and public dimensions.

That our 'guide' is a boy who we know from the first page ends up being 'sent away' and that his child's voice, albeit tinged with adult knowledge, is utterly convincing makes the novel even more laudable.