Someone Like Us

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. – Jonathan Lee * Guardian *I don’t often finish a new novel and immediately want to read it again, but Someone LIke Us … is a magic trick of a book; it sent me scrambling back to try to see how he had done it. In a sense, it’s a wily, self-indicting commentary on Mengestu’s entire career, at once a deepening and an undoing of the “immigrant novel”. It is also a deeply felt story about fathers and sons, and about a man, the result of displacements, entering middle age and realising that he has utterly lost his way. No book this year moved or thrilled me more – Garth Greenwell, Books of the Year * Stylist *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 * New York Times *A captivating novel about displacement, isolation, and oppression. * TIME *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. – Steve Toltz, author of Here Goes NothingIt 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 – Ron Charles * Washington Post *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 – Hamilton Cain * Minneapolis Star Tribune *This quietly affecting novel captures the uncertainty that comes with statelessness and rootlessness – Mark Athitakis * Los Angeles Times *A tough, tender, jaggedly propulsive novel about the costs - and the necessity - of refusing to fit into prescribed stories. An impressive, disquieting achievement. – Aida EdemariamA 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. * Booklist (starred review) *[Mengestu] pulls off an impressive postmodern trick in his long-awaited fourth novel … I loved [this book] – Karan Mahajan, Books of the Year * Granta *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 – Anderson Tepper * New York Times *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 – Erik Gleibermann * Los Angeles Review of Books *

Dinaw Mengestu was born in Ethiopia in 1978 and raised in Illinois. His first novel, Children of the Revolution (published in the US as The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears), won the Guardian First Book Award in 2007, as well as the Los Angeles Times Book Award and the Prix du Premier Roman Etranger. It was followed by How to Read the Air in 2010.

Mengestu’s novels have been translated into more than a dozen languages and his fiction and journalism have been published in the New Yorker, Granta, Harper’s, Rolling Stone, and the Wall Street Journal. He was chosen for the 5 under 35 Award by the National Book Foundation in 2007 and was one of the New Yorker’s 20 under 40 in 2010. In 2012, he was the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. He currently lives with his family in New York.