Children of the Revolution - Softcover

Mengestu, Dinaw

Softcover

ISBN 10: 022407931X ISBN 13: 9780224079310

Publisher: Jonathan Cape, 2007

Synopsis

Sepha Stephanos owns a newsagent and general store in a rundown Washington, D.C. neighbourhood that is on the verge of gentrification. Seventeen years ago he fled the Ethiopian revolution after his father was killed. His life now is quiet, he spends his days reading Russian classics, serving the few customers he has and every Thursday evening he meets with his two friends, Joseph and Kenneth, drinking whisky and making jokes about Africa's long line of dictators and revolutions. When a white woman named Judith moves next door with her mixed-race daughter Naomi, Sepha's life seems on the verge of change. His fragile relationship with them gives him a painful glimpse into the life he could have lived and for which he still holds out hope.

In an astonishingly assured debut, Dinaw Mengestu writes with powerful understatement of one man's longing for the American dream, and of the tenacious grip of the past across continents and time.

About this title

Review:

an impressive moving debut (The Spectator The Spectator)

Mengestu has told a rich and lyrical story of displacement and loneliness. I was profoundly moved by this tale of an Ethiopian immigrant's search for acceptance, peace, and identity. Some of the passages in Ethiopia are heartbreaking and almost unbearably painful. With effortless prose, Mengestu makes us feel this tortured soul's longings, regrets, and in the end, his dreams of meaningful human connection.-- (Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner)

Dinaw Mengestu belongs to that special group of American voices produced by global upheavals and intentional, if sometimes forced, migrations. These are the writer-immigrants coming here from Africa, East India, Eastern Europe and elsewhere. Their struggles for identity mark a new turn within the ranks of American writers I like to call "the in-betweeners." The most interesting work in American literature has often been done by such writers, their liminality and luminosity in American culture produced by changing national definitions (Twain, Kerouac, Ginsberg), by being the children of immigrants themselves (Bellow, Singer), by voluntary exile (Baldwin, Hemingway) and by trauma (Bambara, Morrison). (Los Angeles Times Book Review 2007-03-10)

a quietly brilliant portrait of immigrant life...It reads like an Ethopian variation on The Great Gatsby. Remarkably it's not diminished by this comparison. (Financial Times Financial Times)

a quietly accomplished debut novel... he bestows an immense dignity, never sentimentalising their plight. Despite, or perhaps because of, the attritions of his years in exile, Sepha has remained astonishingly tender. Although occasionally despairing, he has not yet lost the ability to love. In the end, it is this human warmth that triumphs... (Guardian Guardian)

From the Publisher:

Haunting debut by gifted young Ethiopian-American author.

About this edition

• Publisher: Jonathan Cape
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 022407931X
• ISBN 13: 9780224079310
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240