Children of the Revolution

A haunting debut by gifted young Ethiopian-American author and winner of the Guardian First Book Award 2007

A quietly accomplished debut novel... Despite, or perhaps because of, the attritions of his years in exile, Sepha has remained astonishingly tender. In the end, it is this human warmth that triumphs

Brilliant... a courageous and engaging novel

With faultless pitch and tone, this elegiac first novel packs great matters into its modest span

A quietly brilliant portrait of immigrant life... Children of the Revolution reads like an Ethopian variation on The Great Gatsby. Remarkably it's not diminished by this comparison

A rich and lyrical story of displacement and loneliness. I was profoundly moved by this tale of an Ethiopian immigrant's search for acceptance, peace, and identity... Mengestu makes us feel this tortured soul's longings, regrets, and in the end, his dreams of meaningful human connection

Dinaw Mengestu belongs to that special group of American voices produced by global upheavals and intentional, if sometimes forced, migrations... The most interesting work in American literature has often been done by such writers

The immigrant's plight is sensitively captured... But this is not a story of hopelessness - rather, it's the gritty determination and the dark wit...and perspicacity with which Sepha can view his adopted homeland that make this a rich, moving read

Dinaw Mengestu was born in Ethiopia in 1978 and is a graduate of Georgetown and Columbia universities. His 2007 debut novel, Children of the Revolution, won the Guardian First Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. In 2010, he was included in the New Yorker's '20 Under 40' list of writers to watch. He is also the author of How To Read The Air.

Seventeen years after fleeing the revolutionary Ethiopia that claimed his father's life, Sepha Stephanos is a man still caught between two existences: the one he left behind, aged nineteen, and the new life he has forged in Washington D.C. Sepha spends his days in a sort of limbo: quietly running his grocery store into the ground, revisiting the Russian classics, and toasting the old days with his friends Kenneth and Joseph, themselves emigrants from Africa. 
 
But when a white woman named Judith moves next door with her only daughter, Naomi, Sepha's life seems on the verge of change...

Dinaw Mengestu

A straight-forward, compassionate, keenly sensitive observer of real life

A story of exile and redemption, beautifully written

[Mengestu has] pulled off a narrative sleight of hand, weaving two - or is it three? - beautiful fictions, while reminding us subtly that the most seductive may be the least true

How To Read the Air is deeply thought out, deliberate in its craftsmanship and in many parts beautifully written...remarkably talented

Mengestu's finely written novel, his second, tackles family, the break-up of a marriage and the reinvention of a past... Finely written novel

It is a measure of the novel's ultimate success that the narrative has real drive, and also reminds us that fiction really does matter

A powerful and moving summer read that explores love, grief and the reality of the contemporary American immigrant experience 
 
Jonas, fresh from a failed marriage, is desperate to make sense of the ties that have forged him. How can he dream of a future when he can't make sense of his past? He hits the road, tracing the route that his parents - young Ethiopians in search of an identity as an American couple - took thirty years earlier to Nashville, Tennessee. 
 
 In a stunning display of imagination he weaves together a history that takes him from the war-torn Ethiopia of his parents' youth to a brighter vision of his own life in contemporary America, a story - real or invented- that holds the possibility of reconciliation and redemption. 
 
‘A story of exile and redemption, beautifully written’ The Times

How to Read the Air

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Dinaw Mengestu

Praise for How to Read the Air

A straight-forward, compassionate, keenly sensitive observer of real life

A story of exile and redemption, beautifully written

[Mengestu has] pulled off a narrative sleight of hand, weaving two - or is it three? - beautiful fictions, while reminding us subtly that the most seductive may be the least true

A straight-forward, compassionate, keenly sensitive observer of real life

A story of exile and redemption, beautifully written

[Mengestu has] pulled off a narrative sleight of hand, weaving two - or is it three? - beautiful fictions, while reminding us subtly that the most seductive may be the least true

A straight-forward, compassionate, keenly sensitive observer of real life

A story of exile and redemption, beautifully written

[Mengestu has] pulled off a narrative sleight of hand, weaving two - or is it three? - beautiful fictions, while reminding us subtly that the most seductive may be the least true

Books by Dinaw Mengestu

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