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All Our Names

Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available
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.
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    • AudioFile Magazine
      Saskia Maarleveld and Korey Jackson's contrasting voices explore what it means to live in unpredictable settings as this novel unfolds the complex story of two intertwining worlds. The two protagonists, one from Africa and one from the United States, are shaped by another central character, in Africa, whose ideas of change manifest through acts of war. Portraying Isaac, originally from Ethiopia, now in the U.S., Jackson keeps emotion from his voice. Maarleveld's character, Helen, an American from the Midwest, nicknames Isaac Charles Dickens for the formal way he speaks. However, Dickens does not come to mind when Isaac speaks, nor when Maarleveld impersonates him. Maarleveld delivers Helen's perceptions of Isaac with a steadiness and reticence that sometimes conflict with Helen's own self-perceptions. This technique works, offering a bit of mystery to who he truly is. T.E.C. © AudioFile 2014, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from November 18, 2013
      Immigrant stories are often about self-invention, but in his latest novel, in which an African escaping to America cannot leave his past behind, McArthur Fellow Mengestu (How to Read the Air) portrays the intersection of cultures experienced by the immigrant with unsettling perception. Each of the two narratorsâone speaking from the past in Africa, one in present-day Americaâhas a relationship with a young man named Isaac, and the two take turns describing these relationships. The African narrator, a 25-year-old aspiring writer, recounts how he leaves his rural village to subsist on the margins of a university in a city that he simply calls âthe Capital.â There, he finds a friend in the magnetic Isaac, a young revolutionary who draws him into an antigovernment insurgency. The second narrator is Helen, a Midwestern social worker, who takes under her wing and into her heart an African refugee named Isaac, knowing little about his situation and nothing of his history. The action is set after the first flush of African independence, as democratic self-rule proves elusive, while in America racial and social divides persist. In Africa, Isaac, the revolutionary, endures beatings and torture before confronting his own sideâs penchant for violence. In America, Helen and the man she calls Isaac face their own intractable obstacles. Mengestu evokes contrasting landscapes but focuses on his charactersâIsaac, the saddened visionary; Isaac, the secretive refugee; Helen, the sympathetic loverâwho are all caught in a cycle of connection and disruption, engagement and abandonment, hope and disillusion. Agent: P.J. Mark, Janklow & Nesbit Associates.

    • Library Journal

      July 1, 2014

      Here Mengestu (How To Read the Air) uses the story of an affair between Helen, an American social worker in the Midwest, and Isaac, an African immigrant posing as an exchange student, to examine questions of loyalty and community. Do not come to this novel expecting a "traditional" immigrant narrative. Mengestu uses the framework of geography and immigration to tell his sad and often harrowing tale of identity, responsibility, and love. Helen and Isaac relate their own parts of the story in alternating narratives read beautifully by Saskia Maarleveld and Korey Jackson. This structure lends grace notes to a moving, lyrical novel. VERDICT A wonderful listen. ["A highly recommended read that's as absorbing as it is thought-provoking; the ending is a real punch," read the starred review of the Knopf hc, LJ 3/15/14.]--Wendy Galgan, St. Francis Coll., Brooklyn

      Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

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