Someone Like Us
A BARACK OBAMA BOOK OF THE YEAR
'Haunting . . . perfectly attuned to what it means to roam freely as an immigrant in America'
Guardian
'No book this year moved or thrilled me more'
Garth Greenwell, author of Small Rain
A heartbreaking novel about loss, family and exile, from the winner of the Guardian First Book Award
After abandoning his once promising career as a journalist in search of a new life in Paris, Mamush meets Helen - 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 on the verge of collapse, he leaves his young family and returns to the close-knit immigrant Ethiopian community of Washington DC that defined his childhood.
At its center is Mamush's stoic, implacable mother, and Samuel, the larger-than-life father-figure whose ceaseless charm and humor 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.
What follows is an unexpected journey across America in search of answers to questions Mamush has 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 spent masking them.
'It was obvious from the start that Dinaw Mengestu was adding something extraordinary to American literature'
Washington Post
'Dinaw Mengestu thinks deeply about how stories are told, especially migrant tales'
New York Times
'This meticulously crafted gem is not merely read; it is experienced '
Steve Toltz, author of Here Goes Nothing
Dinaw Mengestu was born in Ethiopia in 1978 and raised in Illinois. His first novel, Children of the Revolution (published in the US as The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears), won the Guardian First Book Award in 2007, as well as the Los Angeles Times Book Award and the Prix du Premier Roman Étranger. It was followed by How to Read the Air in 2010.
Mengestu's novels have been translated into more than a dozen languages and his fiction and journalism have been published in the New Yorker, Granta, Harper's, Rolling Stone, and the Wall Street Journal. He was chosen for the 5 under 35 Award by the National Book Foundation in 2007 and was one of the New Yorker's 20 under 40 in 2010. In 2012, he was the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. He currently lives with his family in New York.