Someone Like Us
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Dinaw Mengestu's spellbinding new novel crafts a powerful narrative about race and class and immigration and exile around a transfixing question: How well can we ever know those we love?
After abandoning his once promising career as a journalist in search of a new life in Paris, Mamush meets Hannah--a photographer whose way of seeing the world shows him the possibility of finding not only love, but family. Now, five years later, with his marriage to Helen on the verge of collapse, he returns to the close-knit Ethiopian immigrant community of Washington DC, that defined his childhood. At its centre is Mamush's stoic, implacable mother, and Samuel, the larger-than-life father-figure whose ceaseless charm and humour have always served as cover for a harder, more troubling truth. But on the same day that Mamush arrives home in Washington, Samuel is found dead in his garage.
With Hannah and their two-year old son back in Paris, Mamush sets out on an unexpected journey across America in search of answers to questions he'd been told never to ask. As he does so, he begins to understand that perhaps the only chance he has of saving his family and making it back home is to confront not only the unresolved mystery around Samuel's life and death, but his own troubled memories, and the years he spent masking them. This is a breathtaking, commanding, unforgettable work from one of North America's most prodigiously gifted novelists.
About this Author
DINAW MENGESTU is the author of three novels, all of which were named New York Times Notable Books: All Our Names (Knopf, 2014), How To Read the Air (Riverhead, 2010), and The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (Riverhead, 2007). A native of Ethiopia who came with his family to the United States at the age of two, Mengestu is also a freelance journalist who has reported about life in Darfur, northern Uganda, and eastern Congo. His articles and fiction have appeared in the New York Times, New Yorker, Harper's, Granta, Jane and Rolling Stone. He is a 2012 MacArthur Fellow and recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship for Fiction, National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Award, Guardian First Book Award, and Los Angeles Times Book Prize, among other honors. He was also included in The New Yorker's "20 under 40" list in 2010.
Reviews
"Mengestu's tremendous talents are on full display." --Publishers Weekly
"A beguiling tale, fluently told and closely observed, that conceals as much as it reveals." --Kirkus (starred review)
"An exemplification of storytelling as a consolation for the yearning and dislocation of immigrant life. As the father says, "We are always in more than one place at a time." --New Yorker
"[Someone Like Us] is meticulously constructed and its genius doesn't falter even slightly under scrutiny. This might not be the novel that earns him broad popular acclaim . . . but it's the book that ought to cement Mengestu's reputation as a major literary force." --New York Times
"It was obvious from the start that Dinaw Mengestu was adding something extraordinary to American literature. . . . Once again, Mengestu has driven us along a path we never knew existed to a place we all recognize." --The Washington Post
"In Mengestu's hands, plotlessness and incomprehension never seemed so essential to getting the story right." --Los Angeles Times
"Dinaw Mengestu is a one-of-a-kind, dynamic writer, and Someone Like Us is a worthy display of his talents." --Elle
"Haunting. . . . A paean to the beauty and hardship present in his native Ethiopia, but also alive and present in every corner of the United States." --Guardian
"[A] subtle, brilliant new novel about family secrets. . . . Aside from being a wonderful read, it's a tribute to the majesty of storytelling and its ability to help one make sense of the world. Someone Like Us is the welcome return of a vitally important voice in modern American literature." --BookPage
"A moving, memorable novel." --Booklist
"I love the way Mengestu writes. . . . He's given voice to characters engulfed in their solitude." --Maureen Corrigan via NPR's Fresh Air
"The novel's architecture enthralls, drawing us into the opaque naves and transepts of an addict's shame and an immigrant's tenacious hope. Where some see crowded rooms, Mengestu sees cathedrals. Someone Like Us keeps opening and opening its emotional spaces, long after Samuel is silent." --Minnesota Star Tribune
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