Saturday, October 16, 2010

Cathy's in Awe of This Book


Dinaw Mengestu's first novel, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, earned the young writer comparisons to Bellow, Fitzgerald, and Naipaul, and garnered ecstatic critical praise and awards around the world for its haunting depiction of the immigrant experience. Now Mengestu enriches the themes that defined his debut with a heartbreaking literary masterwork about love, family, and the power of imagination, which confirms his reputation as one of the brightest talents of his generation.

One early September afternoon, Yosef and Mariam, young Ethiopian immigrants 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 a new identity as an American couple. Soon, their son, Jonas, will be born in Illinois. Thirty years later, Yosef has died, and Jonas needs 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 mother and father's trip and weave together a family history that will take him from the war-torn Ethiopia of his parents' youth to his life in the America of today, a story-real or invented- that holds the possibility of reconciliation and redemption.

Cathy says:
"Jonas Woldemariam, son of Ethiopian refugees, tells the story of his parent's marriage through the almost mythical journey they took from Peoria to Nashville. The trip, their marriage and Jonas's life and marriage unfold and unravel in this brilliant story about
storytelling. Once again Dinaw Mengestu has crafted a gem of a novel that, when finished, leaves the reader in awe and slightly altered."

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