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Knopf
March 2014
On Sale: March 4, 2014
272 pages
ISBN: 038534998X
EAN: 9780385349987
Kindle: B00F1W0DLS
Hardcover / e-Book
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Fiction
From acclaimed author 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 an unforgettable love story
about a searing affair between an American woman and an
African man in 1970s America and an unflinching novel about
the fragmentation of lives that straddle countries and
histories.
All Our Names is the story
of two young men who come of age during an African
revolution, drawn from the safe confines of the university
campus into the intensifying clamor of the streets outside.
But as the line between idealism and violence becomes
increasingly blurred, the friends are driven apart—one into
the deepest peril, as the movement gathers inexorable force,
and the other into the safety of exile in the American
Midwest. There, pretending to be an exchange student, he
falls in love with a social worker and settles into
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
beloved friend he left behind, the charismatic leader who
first guided him to revolution and then sacrificed
everything to ensure his freedom.
Elegiac,
blazing with insights about the physical and emotional
geographies that circumscribe our lives, All Our
Names is a marvel of vision and tonal command. Writing
within the grand tradition of Naipul, Greene, and Achebe,
Mengestu gives us a political novel that is also a
transfixing portrait of love and grace, of
self-determination and the names we are given and the names
we earn.
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