Someone Like Us Paperback by Dinaw Mengestu

Product Details

• Publisher: Anchor Canada (2025-10-21)
• Language: English
• Paperback: 272 pages
• ISBN-13: 9780385679824
• Item Weight: 283.5 grams
• Dimensions: 7.99 x 5.18 x 0.81 cm

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S FAVOURITE BOOKS OF 2024 • The son of Ethiopian immigrants seeks to understand a hidden family history and uncovers a past colored by unexpected loss, addiction, and the enduring emotional pull toward home.

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 Hannah 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. A breathtaking, commanding, unforgettable work from one of North America's most prodigiously gifted novelists.

About the Author

DINAW MENGESTU is the author of three previous novels, all of which were named New York Times Notable Books: All Our Names (Bond Street Books, 2014), How To Read the Air (Riverhead, 2010), and The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (Riverhead, 2007). A native of Ethiopia who came with his family to the United States at the age of two, Mengestu is also a freelance journalist who has reported about life in Darfur, northern Uganda, and eastern Congo. His articles and fiction have appeared in the New York Times, the New Yorker, Harper’s, Granta, Jane and Rolling Stone. He is a 2012 MacArthur Fellow and recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship for Fiction, a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Award, a Guardian First Book Award, and Los Angeles Times Book Prize, among other honours. He was also included in The New Yorker’s "20 Under 40" list in 2010.