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Also by Dinaw Mengestu:

All Our Names, March 2014
Hardcover / e-Book
How to Read the Air, October 2010
Hardcover
The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, March 2007
Hardcover

The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears
Dinaw Mengestu

Riverhead
March 2007
On Sale: March 1, 2007
Featuring: Sepha Stephanos
240 pages
ISBN: 1594489408
EAN: 9781594489402
Hardcover
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Fiction

Seventeen years ago, Sepha Stephanos fled the Ethiopian Revolution after witnessing soldiers beat his father to the point of certain death, selling off his parents' jewelry to pay for passage to the United States. Now he finds himself running a grocery store in a poor African-American neighborhood in Washington, D.C. His only companions are two fellow African immigrants who share his feelings of frustration with and bitter nostalgia for their home continent. He realizes that his life has turned out completely different and far more isolated from the one he had imagined for himself years ago.

Soon Sepha's neighborhood begins to change. Hope comes in the form of new neighbors-Judith and Naomi, a white woman and her biracial daughter-who become his friends and remind him of what having a family is like for the first time in years. But when the neighborhood's newfound calm is disturbed by a series of racial incidents, Sepha may lose everything all over again.

Told in a haunting and powerful first-person narration that casts the streets of Washington, D.C., and Addis Ababa through Sepha's eyes, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears is a deeply affecting and unforgettable debut novel about what it means to lose a family and a country-and what it takes to create a new home.

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