“Deeply moving . . . Great lyricism and ferocity . . . An elegiac quality oddly reminiscent of Evelyn Waugh’s
Brideshead Revisited . . . Mengestu writes from the points of view of Helen and Isaac with poignancy and psychological precision, deftly evoking their very different takes on the world. He also manages to make the reader understand the many things they have in common . . . Mengestu is concerned here not only with the dislocations experienced by immigrants, but also with broader questions of identity: how individuals define themselves by their dreams, their choices, the place or places they call home.”
—Michiko Kakutani,
The New York Times“Disarmingly tender . . . Finely calibrated . . . The author perceptively explores the way that alienation serves as the handmaid of idealism . . . Leavening the attendant sadness if the fact that Mengestu’s characters never altogether abandon their hope—it survives not in political or social revolt but in the true and moving depictions of love and friendship.”
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The Wall Street Journal “Mournful, mysterious . . . Tantalizingly laconic . . . Delicately drawn . . . The emotional power seeps through lines that seem placid . . . Devastating.”
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Washington Post “Idealism, disillusionment, justice, and love—these are the topics beautifully explored in
All Our Names . . . Sometimes lyrical, sometimes plaintive, Mengestu’s novel is about a young man coming to terms with his past and trying to determine his future. But it’s also a searing, universal story of emigration and identity.”
—Amazon.com, Best Book of the Month
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All Our Names is about the ways social forces interfere with the bonds between individuals, as well as the ways those bonds hold, even when frayed . . . The story of Helen and the two Isaacs, and the ways their longings mesh or don’t, has a subtle power that gets under the surface of events to explore the complexities of human relationships.”
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The Columbus Dispatch “The stories of the narrators and the Isaacs intertwine as Mengestu explores the perils of love, identity, and memory for a person living in exile.”
—NewYorker.com
“Heart-rending . . . Gorgeously described . . .
All Our Names both invokes and channels
Great Expectations—a novel, like this one, about letting go of myths we’ll never inhabit, so that we might craft new stories that free us to live.”
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Milwaukee Journal Sentinel “Cleanly tailored but potent prose . . . Mengestu cleverly toys with our perceptions . . . Writing with the kind of effortless ease suggestive of much painstaking struggle, Mengestu locates the novel’s horror not in war per se, but in those seemingly born to its bidding.”
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The Toronto Star“Elegiac, moving . . . Mengestu is alert to the nuances of what transplantation and exile can do to the spirit . . . As in a V.S. Naipaul story, neither the country nor the time matter much in a tale about human universals, in this case the universal longing for justice and our seemingly universal inability to achieve it without becoming unjust ourselves . . . Another superb story by Mengestu, who is among the best novelists now at work in America.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Mengestu portrays the intersection of cultures experienced by the immigrant with unsettling perception . . . He evokes contrasting landscapes but focuses on his characters—Isaac, the saddened visionary; Isaac, the secretive refugee; Helen, the sympathetic lover—who are all caught in a cycle of connection and disruption, engagement and abandonment, hope and disillusion.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review, Pick of the Week)
“An elegiac love story . . . Split across two narratives—one in the past, one in the present—
All Our Names dramatizes the clashes between romantic idealism and disillusioned practicality, as well as between self-preservation and violence, all while blurring the identities of those who can move on, those who stay behind, and those who simply change.”
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The Millions, “Most Anticipated: The Great 2014 Book Preview”
“The author highlights the dense slums of Kampala with the same intensity as he does the flatness of his midwestern farm town. But Mengestu is less interested in photographing a particular historical moment than he is fascinated by the dangers each setting imposes upon his vulnerable protagonists and their fragile relationships. And in the end, despite the bleak settings, tenderness somehow triumphs.”
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Booklist