SOMEONE LIKE US

251pp., paperback, Reprint, Sceptre, London, (2024) 2025

ISBN:‎ 9781444793819

With his marriage on the verge of collapse, Mamush leaves Paris and returns to his family and the immigrant Ethiopian community of Washington, DC, where he grew up. There he is forced to confront the mystery surrounding Samuel, found dead on the day Mamush arrives home, and who may or may not be his father.

"It was obvious from the start that Dinaw Mengestu was adding something extraordinary to American literature ... Forged from an alloy that defies the heat of the melting pot, Mengestu’s stories are an inimitable monument to the African immigrant experience. In book after book, this patron saint of longing has unraveled the twisted privileges and agonies of being here but not of here ... Once again, Mengestu has driven us along a path we never knew existed to a place we all recognize." The Washington Post

"Stunning ... Mengestu’s latest pushes far beyond ‘immigrant novel’ status or any similar, confining labels, meditating expansively on questions of displacement, family love, and the battle between denial and self-reckoning." The Los Angeles Review of Books

Dinaw Mengestu was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1978. He is the recipient of a fellowship in fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts and a Lannan Literary Award, and received a "5 under 35" Award from the National Book Foundation. His first novel, Children of the Revolution, was awarded the Guardian First Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, among numerous other honours. He is the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of the Humanities and the Director of the Written Arts program and the Center for Ethics and Writing at Bard College.