Someone Like Us

Dinaw Mengestu's spellbinding new novel crafts a powerful narrative about race and class and immigration and exile around a transfixing question: How well can we ever know those we love?

After abandoning his once promising career as a journalist in search of a new life in Paris, Mamush meets Hannah—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 to Helen on the verge of collapse, he returns to the close-knit Ethiopian immigrant community of Washington DC, that defined his childhood. At its centre is Mamush's stoic, implacable mother, and Samuel, the larger-than-life father-figure whose ceaseless charm and humour 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.

With Hannah and their two-year old son back in Paris, Mamush sets out on an unexpected journey across America in search of answers to questions he'd 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 he spent masking them. This is a breathtaking, commanding, unforgettable work from one of North America's most prodigiously gifted novelists.