Author: Dinaw Mengestu
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101217561
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 311
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Book Description
Seventeen years ago, Sepha Stephanos fled the Ethiopian Revolution for a new start in the United States. Now he finds himself running a failing grocery store in a poor African-American section of Washington, D.C., his only companions two fellow African immigrants who share his bitter nostalgia and longing for his home continent. Years ago and worlds away Sepha could never have imagined a life of such isolation. As his environment begins to change, hope comes in the form of a friendship with new neighbors Judith and Naomi, a white woman and her biracial daughter. But when a series of racial incidents disturbs the community, Sepha may lose everything all over again. Watch a QuickTime interview with Dinaw Mengestu about this book.
Author: Dinaw Mengestu
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 9781594489402
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 252
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Book Description
Seventeen years ago, Sepha Stephanos fled the Ethiopian Revolution after witnessing soldiers beat his father to the point of certain death, selling off his parents' jewelry to pay for passage to the United States. Now he finds himself running a grocery store in a poor African-American neighborhood in Washington, D.C. His only companions are two fellow African immigrants who share his feelings of frustration with and bitter nostalgia for their home continent. He realizes that his life has turned out completely different and far more isolated from the one he had imagined for himself years ago. Soon Sepha's neighborhood begins to change. Hope comes in the form of new neighbors-Judith and Naomi, a white woman and her biracial daughter-who become his friends and remind him of what having a family is like for the first time in years. But when the neighborhood's newfound calm is disturbed by a series of racial incidents, Sepha may lose everything all over again. Told in a haunting and powerful first-person narration that casts the streets of Washington, D.C., and Addis Ababa through Sepha's eyes, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bearsis a deeply affecting and unforgettable debut novel about what it means to lose a family and a country-and what it takes to create a new home.
Author: Dinaw Mengestu
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 1594482853
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Seventeen years ago, Sepha Stephanos fled the Ethiopian Revolution for a new start in the United States. Now he finds himself running a failing grocery store in a poor African-American section of Washington, D.C., his only companions two fellow African immigrants who share his bitter nostalgia and longing for his home continent. Years ago and worlds away Sepha could never have imagined a life of such isolation. As his environment begins to change, hope comes in the form of a friendship with new neighbors Judith and Naomi, a white woman and her biracial daughter. But when a series of racial incidents disturbs the community, Sepha may lose everything all over again. Watch a QuickTime interview with Dinaw Mengestu about this book.
Author: Dinaw Mengestu
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0385349998
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 244
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Book Description
From acclaimed author Dinaw Mengestu, a recipient of the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 award, The New Yorker’s 20 Under 40 award, and a 2012 MacArthur Foundation genius grant, comes an unforgettable love story about a searing affair between an American woman and an African man in 1970s America and an unflinching novel about the fragmentation of lives that straddle countries and histories. All Our Names is the story of two young men who come of age during an African revolution, drawn from the safe confines of the university campus into the intensifying clamor of the streets outside. But as the line between idealism and violence becomes increasingly blurred, the friends are driven apart—one into the deepest peril, as the movement gathers inexorable force, and the other into the safety of exile in the American Midwest. There, pretending to be an exchange student, he falls in love with a social worker and settles into small-town life. Yet this idyll is inescapably darkened by the secrets of his past: the acts he committed and the work he left unfinished. Most of all, he is haunted by the beloved friend he left behind, the charismatic leader who first guided him to revolution and then sacrificed everything to ensure his freedom. Elegiac, blazing with insights about the physical and emotional geographies that circumscribe our lives, All Our Names is a marvel of vision and tonal command. Writing within the grand tradition of Naipul, Greene, and Achebe, Mengestu gives us a political novel that is also a transfixing portrait of love and grace, of self-determination and the names we are given and the names we earn. This eBook edition includes a Reading Group Guide.
Author: Olivia Clare Friedman
Publisher: Grove Press
ISBN: 0802147062
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 141
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Book Description
The debut novel from the “Munro-esque” (Houston Post) author of Disasters in the First World, Here Lies is Olivia Clare Friedman’s visceral and portentous look at mourning, memory, and motherhood in an alternate Louisiana ravaged by climate change. Louisiana, 2042. Spurred by the effects of climate change, states have closed graveyards and banned burials, making cremation mandatory and the ashes of loved ones state-owned unless otherwise claimed. In the small town of St. Genevieve, Alma lives alone and struggles to grieve in the wake of her young mother Naomi’s death, during which Alma failed to honor Naomi’s final wishes. Now, Alma decides to fight to reclaim Naomi’s ashes, a journey of unburial that will bring into her life a mysterious and fiercely loyal stranger, Bordelon, who appears in St. Genevieve after a storm, as well as a group of strong, rebellious local women who, together, teach Alma anew the meaning of family and strength. With poignance, poeticism, and deep insight in Here Lies, Olivia Clare Friedman gives us a stunning portrait of motherhood, friendship, and humanity in an alternate American South torn asunder by global warming. This is a stunning first novel from a unique and inventive writer.
Author: Dinaw Mengestu
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 144813711X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 339
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Book Description
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
Author: Dinaw Mengestu
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1448163560
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 240
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Book Description
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...
Author: Patricia Storace
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0375707557
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 386
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Book Description
From the author of the acclaimed Dinner with Persephone comes a radically original novel about four women who invite us to imagine the divine anew: what if “a woman’s point of view” were also God’s? Patricia Storace’s Eve begins by telling us her version of what happened in Eden, and by revealing that our familiar constellations conceal other heavens we have never allowed ourselves to see. Each of the four subsequent chapters is the story of one of these new zodiacs, featuring images central to women: a knife, a cauldron, a garden, a pair of embracing lovers. The four women whose stories they tell are Job’s daughter, the Queen of Sheba, a polytheistic cook, and a transformed Sarah, wife of Abraham. Storace brilliantly reimagines the worlds of these women, freeing them from the old tales in which they were trapped and putting them in the foreground of their stories and of the Old Testament itself.
Author: Jaroslav Kalfar
Publisher: Little, Brown
ISBN: 0316273406
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 233
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Book Description
An intergalactic odyssey of love, ambition, and self-discovery. Orphaned as a boy, raised in the Czech countryside by his doting grandparents, Jakub Prochv°zka has risen from small-time scientist to become the country's first astronaut. When a dangerous solo mission to Venus offers him both the chance at heroism he's dreamt of, and a way to atone for his father's sins as a Communist informer, he ventures boldly into the vast unknown. But in so doing, he leaves behind his devoted wife, Lenka, whose love, he realizes too late, he has sacrificed on the altar of his ambitions. Alone in Deep Space, Jakub discovers a possibly imaginary giant alien spider, who becomes his unlikely companion. Over philosophical conversations about the nature of love, life and death, and the deliciousness of bacon, the pair form an intense and emotional bond. Will it be enough to see Jakub through a clash with secret Russian rivals and return him safely to Earth for a second chance with Lenka? Rich with warmth and suspense and surprise, Spaceman of Bohemia is an exuberant delight from start to finish. Very seldom has a novel this profound taken readers on a journey of such boundless entertainment and sheer fun. "A frenetically imaginative first effort, booming with vitality and originality . . . Kalfar's voice is distinct enough to leave tread marks."-Jennifer Senior, New York Times
Author: Maaza Mengiste
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393076776
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 321
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Book Description
"An important novel, rich in compassion for its anguished characters." —The New York Times Book Review This memorable, heartbreaking story opens in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 1974, on the eve of a revolution. Yonas kneels in his mother’s prayer room, pleading to his god for an end to the violence that has wracked his family and country. His father, Hailu, a prominent doctor, has been ordered to report to jail after helping a victim of state-sanctioned torture to die. And Dawit, Hailu’s youngest son, has joined an underground resistance movement—a choice that will lead to more upheaval and bloodshed across a ravaged Ethiopia. Beneath the Lion’s Gaze tells a gripping story of family, of the bonds of love and friendship set in a time and place that has rarely been explored in fiction. It is a story about the lengths human beings will go in pursuit of freedom and the human price of a national revolution. Emotionally gripping, poetic, and indelibly tragic, Beneath The Lion’s Gaze is a transcendent and powerful debut.
