All Our Names

Dinaw Mengestu

Mar 2014 · Recorded Books · Narrated by Korey Jackson and Saskia Maarleveld

About this audiobook

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.

About the author

Dinaw Mengestu was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in 1978. In 1980, he, his mother, and his sister immigrated to the United States to join his father, who fled Ethiopia during the Red Terror. He graduated from Georgetown University and Columbia University's MFA program in fiction. He is the author of The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears and How to Read the Air. He has also written for several publications including Rolling Stone and Harper's.