From 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 a novel about exile, about the loneliness and fragmentation of lives that straddle countries and histories. All Our Names is the story of a young man who comes of age during an African revolution, drawn from the hushed halls of his university into the intensifying clamor of the streets outside. But as the line between idealism and violence becomes increasingly blurred, and the path of revolution leads to almost certain destruction, he leaves behind his country and friends for America. There, pretending to be an exchange student, he falls in love with a social worker and settles into the routines of 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 charismatic leader who first guided him to revolution and then sacrificed everything to ensure his freedom. Subtle, intelligent, and quietly devastating, All Our Names is a novel about identity, about the names we are given and the names we earn. The emotional power of Mengestu’s work is indelible.

African-born author Dinaw Mengestu’s prose is praised as “heart-rending and indelible” (Publishers Weekly), and his debut novel The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears was a New York Times Notable Book. In How to Read the Air, Mengestu crafts a moving tale about one man’s search for identity. After his estranged Ethiopian immigrant father dies, Jonas hopes to answer questions about his heritage and culture. So he leaves his wife and home in New York and sets out across the trail his own parents took when they first arrived in America.

Ethiopian EmigrE author Dinaw Mengestu is a skilled observer of people who earned a starred review from Publishers Weekly for this colorful debut. Insightful and swiftly paced, this novel evokes past and present in the course of its compelling narrative. It’s the ’70s, and one D.C. neighborhood is undergoing big changes. In the mix is Ethiopian grocery owner Sepha Stephanos-a man with a complex past who fled his homeland after seeing his father brutalized.