Dinaw Mengestu Journalist Profile

Articles

'Someone Like Us' Is One of the 100 Must-Read Books of 2024

Nov 13, 2024 | time.com | Shannon Carlin |Dinaw Mengestu

These are independent reviews of the products mentioned, but TIME receives a commission when purchases are made through affiliate links at no additional cost to the purchaser. By Shannon CarlinNovember 13, 2024 8:19 AM ESTAward-winning author Dinaw Mengestu’s fourth novel, Someone Like Us, is a surreal exploration of self-discovery.
Review: A mysterious death and an urgent quest power this novel's troubled protagonist

Jul 31, 2024 | arcamax.com | Dinaw Mengestu

Three paragraphs into his wise and genial novel, "Someone Like Us," Dinaw Mengestu drops a grenade that sits, smoldering, in the story; we almost forget it as the author toggles through a span of four chilly December days. It's evidence of his dexterous narrative technique — tipping in secrets and secrets-within-secrets — that propels his tale toward a satisfying, if ambivalent, conclusion.
Review: ‘Someone Like Us’ a dizzying portrait of the immigrant experience

Jul 30, 2024 | datebook.sfchronicle.com | Dinaw Mengestu |Alexis Burling

“Someone Like Us” by Dinaw Mengestu. Photo: KnopfEthiopian-born Dinaw Mengestu is no stranger to excavating the harsh hidden truths in American immigrants’ stories. His first three novels, “The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears,” “How to Read the Air” and “All Our Names,” eloquently explore some of the many challenges facing Ethiopian newcomers struggling to adapt to their foreign surroundings.
The Border Is Not the Problem

Jul 30, 2024 | time.com | Dinaw Mengestu

IdeasBy Dinaw MengestuJuly 30, 2024 7:00 AM EDTMengestu is an Ethiopian American novelist, and is a 2012 MacArthur Fellow. He is recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship for Fiction, a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Prize, Guardian First Book Award, and the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. His latest book is Someone Like UsWhen my father arrived in America from Ethiopia in 1978, he was resettled, with the help of an immigration agency, to Peoria, Ill.
This Novel's Reliably Unreliable Narrator Is Here, There and Everywhere

Jul 30, 2024 | nytimes.com | Dinaw Mengestu

SOMEONE LIKE US, by Dinaw MengestuSecrets are the enduring motors that make fiction run: what you aren't telling me, what I'm keeping from you, what the neighbors know about the love affair. Dinaw Mengestu's novels are powered by something different but akin: an urge toward privacy that keeps his mercurial characters elusive, even to themselves, but not opaque. The main character of " All Our Names" (2014) never reveals to his love interest, or to the reader, the name he was born with.
The Border Is Not the Problem

Jul 29, 2024 | msn.com | Dinaw Mengestu

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'All Our Names' author Dinaw Mengestu returns with mysterious 'Someone Like Us'

Jul 24, 2024 | startribune.com | Hamilton Cain |Dinaw Mengestu

Three paragraphs into his wise and genial novel, "Someone Like Us," Dinaw Mengestu drops a grenade that sits, smoldering, in the story; we almost forget it as the author toggles through a span of four chilly December days. It's evidence of his dexterous narrative technique — tipping in secrets and secrets-within-secrets — that propels his tale toward a satisfying, if ambivalent, conclusion.
'All Our Names' author Dinaw Mengestu returns with mysterious 'Someone Like Us'

Jul 24, 2024 | startribune.com | Hamilton Cain |Dinaw Mengestu

Three paragraphs into his wise and genial novel, “Someone Like Us,” Dinaw Mengestu drops a grenade that sits, smoldering, in the story; we almost forget it as the author toggles through a span of four chilly December days. It’s evidence of his dexterous narrative technique — tipping in secrets and secrets-within-secrets — that propels his tale toward a satisfying, if ambivalent, conclusion.
Someone Like Us.

Jul 3, 2024 | thefreelibrary.com | Dinaw Mengestu

* Someone Like UsBy Dinaw MengestuLITERARY FICTIONOne of the many challenges of being an immigrant is how, as your perception adjusts to life in a new land, it can begin to feel like you've lost touch with your homeland. Dinaw Mengestu plays with this dynamic in Someone Like Us (Knopf, $28, 9780385350006), his subtle, brilliant new novel about family secrets.
Someone Like Us

May 28, 2024 | libraryjournal.com | Dinaw Mengestu

Mamush, the American-born son of Ethiopian immigrants who now lives in Paris with his wife and son, arrives at his mother’s house in Washington, DC, to find that Samuel, a close family friend, has died. Mamush knows that Samuel was actually his father, although nobody acknowledges it, and he decides to fly to Chicago, hoping to discover the reason for Samuel’s past incarceration.