All Our Names

Description

“A fierce and tender examination of identity, love, disillusionment, friendship and sacrifice. . . . Extraordinary.” —National Post

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 clamour 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. A New York Times Book Review Editor’s Pick  
National Bestseller 
Named a Best Book of the Year by Kirkus Reviews and The Globe and Mail
A New York Times Notable Book  
Nominated for the International Dublin Literary Award 

“Mengestu . . . tells the mournful, mysterious story of an African man who comes to the Midwest on a student visa. He captures beautifully the conflicted emotions of someone who has survived the loss of his family, his country and his identity.”
—The Washington Post

“Deeply moving new novel. . . . Mr. Mengestu writes from the points of view of Helen and Isaac with poignancy and psychological precision, deftly evoking their very different takes on the world.”
—The New York Times

“All Our Names injects a refreshing novelty to “the novel” as an artifact of experience. Two worlds and perspectives, severed by time and irreconcilable personal histories, are pitted side-by-side, revealing the fragile strands that together make up a life.”
—The Globe and Mail

“Dinaw Mengestu has already made his mark on the international stage as an extremely gifted writer who draws on his Ethiopian heritage as well as his experience as a journalist, to create timeless fiction about the human condition. He shows us people confronting situations most of us are lucky enough not to have to deal with—exile, poverty, hunger and violence—and reminds us of our common humanity.”
—The Bookseller

“Worlds on a cusp, powerfully drawn: notable above all is Mengestu’s desperately moving portrait of a compromised friendship. . . . His most impressive examination yet of the African diaspora.”
—The Telegraph (starred review)

“Mr. Mengestu’s characters never altogether abandon their hope—it survives not in political or social revolt but in the true and moving depictions of love and friendship.”
—The Wall Street Journal

“Writing with the kind of effortless ease suggestive of much painstaking struggle, Mengestu locates the novel’s horror not in war per se, but in those seemingly born to its bidding.”
—The Toronto Star

“All Our Names is taut and swift as a novella with an abiding mystery driving it forward. . . . One reads to the end of All Our Names with a kind of desperate intensity.”
—Boston Globe

“In his beautifully written new novel, All Our Names, the author returns to his main themes of dislocation and self-reinvention with the story of a young man who leaves Ethiopia and gets caught up with revolutionary violence in Uganda in the early 1970s. . . . It’s a powerful new addition to a growing list of accomplishments for Mengestu.”
—Chicago Tribune

“All Our Names has been described as an immigrant’s tale, or a story of race in America during the civil rights movement, but it’s also a richly told love story that promises love can thrive in silence.”
—Hazlitt

“The novel . . . has the trappings of an elegant thriller. But it also examines love in its various manifestations, as well as exile and identity—themes close to this 36-year-old novelist’s heart.”
—Calgary Herald

“Weighted with sorrow and gravitas, another superb story by Mengestu, who is among the best novelists now at work in America.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred)

“All Our Names is a fierce and tender examination of identity, love, disillusionment, friendship and sacrifice. . . . Extraordinary.”
—National Post  

“Mengestu’s fiction is about human connection. . . . He writes with a striking poignancy and refreshing lack of sentimentality.”
—Planet Jackson Hole

Dinaw Mengestu’s All Our Names has an enduring place on my mental bookshelf—it’s a haunting novel.”
—The Seattle Times

“Isaac’s narrative traces his previous life as a student in post-independence Uganda, and slowly reveals the truth about his identity. . . . All Our Names offers a different take on the immigrant tale.”
—The Canadian Press

“All Our Names forces the reader to ask questions. How do names shape identity, and how is identity fluid? There are no easy answers in Mengestu’s third novel, but readers will have the sense that they are watching a master at work.”
—Daily Herald Tribune

“What’s fascinating about All Our Names is the unsettling way it engages with history—both the history of Uganda and literary history. . . . [Mengestu] is rapidly becoming a writer on the global stage.”
—The Guardian

“Mengestu is a serious novelist and his great themes are nothing less than the long shadow cast by imperialism and the ways post-colonial societies remake themselves or, more crucially, fail to do so. The plangency that is the reigning tone of all his books is a finely calibrated, if involuntary, response of individual lives broken by the intractable forces of history.”
—The Independent

“Mengestu is a master of manipulation, laying everything out slowly, tantalizingly, without spoiling the surprises. . . . All Our Names [is] something of a psychological thriller: deeply personal and propelled by events we recognize in places we know.”
—Santa Fe New Mexican

“All Our Names is a captivating novel, one that blends together good prose, excellent characterizations, and strong themes into a whole that is stronger than the sum of its parts. . . . It is Mengestu’s best novel to date and hopefully a sign that he will continue to produce excellent fictions that force readers to consider closely how they and others view the world around them.”
—Gogol’s Overcoat
DINAW MENGESTU is the author of three novels, all of which were named New York Times Notable Books: All Our Names, How To Read the Air, and The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears. 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, New Yorker, Harper’s, Granta, Jane and Rolling Stone. He is a 2012 MacArthur Fellow and recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship for Fiction, National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Award, Guardian First Book Award, and Los Angeles Times Book Prize, among other honors. He was also included in The New Yorker’s “20 under 40” list in 2010.US

Additional information