Someone Like Us
On sale
1st August 2024
Price: £18.99
‘This meticulously crafted gem is not merely read; it is experienced ‘
Steve Toltz, author of Here Goes Nothing
‘Haunting . . . perfectly attuned to what it means to roam freely as an immigrant in America’
Guardian
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
Steve Toltz, author of Here Goes Nothing
‘Haunting . . . perfectly attuned to what it means to roam freely as an immigrant in America’
Guardian
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
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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
Someone Like Us is meticulously constructed and its genius doesn't falter even slightly under scrutiny . . . it's the book that ought to cement Mengestu's reputation as a major literary force
This quietly affecting novel captures the uncertainty that comes with statelessness and rootlessness
Wise and genial . . . 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
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.
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
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