Dinaw Mengestu’s haunting novel about 21st-century American life starts with a sudden death. The deceased man is Samuel – a charismatic, witty, enigmatic Ethiopian immigrant whom our narrator, Mamush, thinks of as his father. But Samuel’s life will turn out to be every bit as mysterious as his demise, and as full of contradictions as America itself.
When Mamush learns of Samuel’s death, he leaves his wife and child behind in France and returns to the close-knit Ethiopian community in Washington DC that shaped his childhood. He’s propelled forward by feelings of personal grief, but also a professional urge to investigate the truth. Mamush is a journalist who, not unlike his creator – the recipient of the Guardian first book award for his fiction, and also accolades for reportage – has had success writing about conflicts at home and abroad. But he has grown tired of covering “long-simmering border conflicts and the refugee crises that grew out of them”, and meeting the needs of editors for whom, he drily notes, “dictators were once again all the rage”.
