How to read the air / Dinaw Mengestu.
Material type: TextPublication details: London : Jonathan Cape, 2010.Description: 325 p. ; 22 cmISBN:- 0224084712 (hbk.)
- 9780224084710 (hbk.)
- 813 MEN
Item type | Current library | Call number | Copy number | Status | Date due | Barcode | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Standard Loan | Moylish Library Fiction Collection | 813 MEN (Browse shelf(Opens below)) | 1 | Available | 39002100401638 |
Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:
Dinaw Mengestu's first novel, Children of the Revolution , earned him comparisons to Bellow, Fitzgerald and Naipaul, garnered ecstatic critical praise and won the Guardian First Book Award for its haunting depiction of the immigrant experience in America. Now, he enriches the themes that defined his debut in a story that captures two generations of an immigrant family.
One early September afternoon, Yosef and Mariam, young Ethiopians who have spent all but their first year of marriage apart, set off on a road trip from their new home in Peoria, Illinois, to Nashville, Tennessee, in search of an identity as an American couple. Thirty years later, Yosef has died, and the couple's son, Jonas, is desperate to make sense of the volatile generational and cultural ties that have forged him. How can he envision his future without knowing what has come before? Leaving behind his marriage and job in New York, Jonas sets out to retrace his parents' trip and, in a stunning display of imagination, weaves together a family 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 heartbreaking masterwork about love, family and the power of imagination, How to Read the Air confirms Dinaw Mengestu's reputation as one of the brightest talents of his generation.
Excerpt provided by Syndetics
Author notes provided by Syndetics
Dinaw Mengestu was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in 1978. In 1980, he, his mother, and his sister immigrated to the United States to join his father, who fled Ethiopia during the Red Terror. He graduated from Georgetown University and Columbia University's MFA program in fiction. He is the author of The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears and How to Read the Air. He has also written for several publications including Rolling Stone and Harper's.(Bowker Author Biography)