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Someone Like Us: 'No book this year moved or thrilled me more' - Garth Greenwell
Dinaw Mengestu
Formats & Editions
A BOOK OF THE YEAR IN THE NEW YORK TIMES, STYLIST, AND GRANTAA 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 RainA 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
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Praise for Someone Like Us: 'No book this year moved or thrilled me more' - Garth Greenwell
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Haunting . . . Like Teju Cole's Open City or Joseph O'Neill's Netherland, Someone Like Us is perfectly attuned to what it means to roam freely as an immigrant in America . . . Someone Like Us starts out like a mystery novel but becomes, in the end, something more like a ghost story: a meditation on the ways we can be part of a place yet simultaneously separate from it. It is the kind of book Mamush's father says he plans to write one day: a paean to the beauty and hardship present in his native Ethiopia, but also alive and present in every corner of the United States. - GuardianDarkly luminous and profound, Mengestu has once again created a masterful narrative that's uniquely his own. Someone Like Us is both haunting and vibrantly alive, mapping the geography of a family's hidden truths with compelling, urgent beauty. This meticulously crafted gem is not merely read; it is experienced.A captivating novel about displacement, isolation, and oppression. - TIMEA tough, tender, jaggedly propulsive novel about the costs - and the necessity - of refusing to fit into prescribed stories. An impressive, disquieting achievement.It was obvious from the start that Dinaw Mengestu was adding something extraordinary to American literature . . . His new novel, Someone Like Us, teases the inclusive spirit of that title. Like all of Mengestu's novels, it's about the struggle to feel settled, to feel at peace, but once again he edges around that theme by a wholly unexpected route . . . Mengestu has driven us along a path we never knew existed to a place we all recognize - Washington Post
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