February 1, 2024
Award-winning Mengestu, whose three previous novels were all NYT Notable Books, here writes about the son of Ethiopian immigrants, Mamush, whose father's unexpected death sends him on a journey for answers about his family's past--which also affects his relationship with his wife and two-year-old son. Prepub Alert.
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Starred review from May 15, 2024
Family secrets surface and are hidden away again in Mengestu's atmospheric story. Mamush, Mengestu's protagonist, is a world-traveling journalist who has made a name for himself reporting on the worst of humanity: war, genocide, and "long--simmering border conflicts and the refugee crises that grew out of them." Home and a wife and child in Paris call to him. But so does his family in the Washington suburbs, including a man, newly deceased, who is Mamush's father--or is he? The first sign that something isn't quite right in Mamush's world is that he reroutes the subsequent emergency trip across the Atlantic to Chicago, where he once concocted an alter ego, a hidden life that fulfills a wise comment by a college friend: "You're like a donut. There's a hole in the middle, where something solid should be." But Samuel, his father, harbored a secret life, too, that Mamush is determined to ferret out, including time spent behind bars. As Mengestu's story unfolds, Mamush emerges as a young man not entirely at home in his own skin, even as Samuel takes shape as a well-meaning dreamer with a headful of business schemes and a taxicab full of neglected traffic citations, occasioning more than one interaction with racist cops. Samuel is a man of strong opinions as well, convinced that everyone is out to get him, especially Ethiopians who choose to speak English rather than Amharic. In Mengestu's skillful hands Mamush is anything but a reliable narrator, but Samuel's homespun wisdom, born of struggles that we can only guess at, is the real takeaway, his voice from beyond the grave insisting, "Go home to your family, Mamush. Right now. As fast as you can, and once there, do everything you can not to leave." A beguiling tale, fluently told and closely observed, that conceals as much as it reveals.
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Starred review from May 13, 2024
In the beautiful latest from Mengestu (All Our Names), a journalist pieces together the mysteries of his early life in the wake of his biological father’s death. The story takes place over three days after Mamush travels from Paris to the Ethiopian community outside Washington, D.C., where he spent the latter half of his childhood. Upon his arrival, he learns from his mother that Samuel, whom Mamush knew growing up as a family friend and later found out was his father, has just been found dead in his garage. The circumstances of Samuel’s death are murky and people are careful about making assumptions, partly due to the taboo nature of suicide in Ethiopian culture. After Mamush pays condolences to Samuel’s wife, he heads to Chicago, where he was born shortly after his mother emigrated from Ethiopia, hoping to find answers about Samuel and his mother’s early relationship. Mamush knows Samuel arrived in Chicago when Mamush was six, with plans to start a network of taxis around the U.S., but instead toiled as a cabbie and became addicted to drugs. From there, the story unfolds like a fairy tale as Mamush imagines the ghost of Samuel telling him how he met Mamush’s mother and why they were never together in the U.S. Mengestu shifts fluidly between fabulism and realism, and the narrative is full of wisdom related to Samuel’s disillusionment with the American dream. Mengestu’s tremendous talents are on full display. Agent: PJ Mark, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc.
Starred review from June 1, 2024
To untangle his family's secrets, an Ethiopian American writer must confront demons similar to those that afflicted his complicated father. As a child, Mamush knew that Samuel, the taciturn insomniac taxi driver, was his father, and not just his mother's childhood friend. But the details of Mamush's parents' history, like so much about Samuel's life, are opaque. For what crime was he arrested in Chicago? Where did Samuel go, all those times he vanished in the night? And why was someone trying to break into the bedroom Samuel shared with his wife, Elsa? Depressive and restless, Mamush seeks answers even as his self-destructive tendencies flare, and his own marriage flounders. As with his previous novels, Mengestu (All Our Names, 2014) blurs historical details in favor of crisply remembered experience--dwellings in the Washington, DC, suburbs and the textures of 20-year-old taxi cabs. Here, too, he 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. A moving, memorable novel.
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June 1, 2024
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. Told in Mamush's voice, the novel moves back and forth through time chronicling his childhood, his mother's strength, and his close relationship with Samuel, who became a taxi driver in DC. The book presses on Mamush's mother's refusal to shed much light on her past and on Samuel's summation of his experiences as a refugee, concluding that moving to the States was actually an end, rather than a beginning. VERDICT Award-winning Mengestu (All Our Names) expertly portrays the lives of immigrants who are never totally accepted in their adopted country and their American-born children who must straddle both worlds.--Jacqueline Snider
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