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‘Masterful . . . haunting and vibrantly alive’
Steve Toltz, author of Here Goes Nothing
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.
‘Dinaw Mengestu thinks deeply about how stories are told, especially migrant tales’
New York Times
Steve Toltz, author of Here Goes Nothing
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.
‘Dinaw Mengestu thinks deeply about how stories are told, especially migrant tales’
New York Times
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Reviews
A tough, tender, jaggedly propulsive novel about the costs - and the necessity - of refusing to fit into prescribed stories. An impressive, disquieting achievement.
A captivating novel about displacement, isolation, and oppression.
A moving, memorable novel . . . [Mengestu] defies standard immigrant-narrative tropes in which successes compensate for feelings of longing, displacement, and loss. But this time, it's bleaker as Mengestu emphasizes his characters' fears of deportation, of being pulled over by police, and their utter exhaustion as work and anxiety rob them of sleep.
Darkly 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.
Dinaw Mengestu thinks deeply about how stories are told, especially migrant tales . . . Mamush embarks on a quest to unravel the secrets of Samuel's life and death, searching his own foggy memories as well as a paper trail that includes court documents and parking tickets to flesh out Samuel's precarious, itinerant existence as a cabdriver in America