Someone Like Us

A Novel

By: Dinaw Mengestu

Narrated by: Junior Nyong'o

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE • 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 immigrant Ethiopian community of Washington, DC, that defined his childhood. At its center is Mamush’s stoic, implacable mother, and Samuel, the larger-than-life father figure whose ceaseless charm and humor have always served as a 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 spent masking them. Breathtaking, commanding, unforgettable work from one of America’s most prodigiously gifted novelists.

©2024 Dinaw Mengestu (P)2024 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

"Someone Like Us is meticulously constructed and its genius doesn’t falter even slightly under scrutiny. . . . it’s the book that ought to cement Mengestu’s reputation as a major literary force."—The New York Times

“Wise and genial. . . . The novel's architecture enthralls, drawing us into the opaque naves and transepts of an addict's shame and an immigrant's tenacious hope.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune

"It was obvious from the start that Dinaw Mengestu was adding something extraordinary to American literature. . . . Forged from an alloy that defies the heat of the melting pot, Mengestu’s stories are an inimitable monument to the African immigrant experience. In book after book, this patron saint of longing has unraveled the twisted privileges and agonies of being here but not of here. . . . Once again, Mengestu has driven us along a path we never knew existed to a place we all recognize."—The Washington Post

I did not enjoy this

The reading was weirdly paced and the story hard to follow and not very interesting. The book was depressing.