How to Read the Air

Dinaw Mengestu

Oct 2010 · Recorded Books · Narrated by Corey Allen

About this audiobook

African-born author Dinaw Mengestu's prose is praised as "heart-rending and indelible" (Publishers Weekly), and his debut novel The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears was a New York Times Notable Book. In How to Read the Air, Mengestu crafts a moving tale about one man's search for identity. After his estranged Ethiopian immigrant father dies, Jonas hopes to answer questions about his heritage and culture. So he leaves his wife and home in New York and sets out across the trail his own parents took when they first arrived in America.

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.