Mengestu has told a rich and lyrical story of displacement and loneliness. I was profoundly moved by this tale of an Ethiopian immigrant's search for acceptance, peace, and identity. Some of the passages in Ethiopia are heartbreaking and almost unbearably painful. With effortless prose, Mengestu makes us feel this tortured soul's longings, regrets, and in the end, his dreams of meaningful human connection
Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

an impressive moving debut
The Spectator, The Spectator

Mengestu has told a rich and lyrical story of displacement and loneliness. I was profoundly moved by this tale of an Ethiopian immigrant's search for acceptance, peace, and identity. Some of the passages in Ethiopia are heartbreaking and almost unbearably painful. With effortless prose, Mengestu makes us feel this tortured soul's longings, regrets, and in the end, his dreams of meaningful human connection.--
Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

Dinaw Mengestu belongs to that special group of American voices produced by global upheavals and intentional, if sometimes forced, migrations. These are the writer-immigrants coming here from Africa, East India, Eastern Europe and elsewhere. Their struggles for identity mark a new turn within the ranks of American writers I like to call 'the in-betweeners.' The most interesting work in American literature has often been done by such writers, their liminality and luminosity in American culture produced by changing national definitions (Twain, Kerouac, Ginsberg), by being the children of immigrants themselves (Bellow, Singer), by voluntary exile (Baldwin, Hemingway) and by trauma (Bambara, Morrison)
Los Angeles Times Book Review

A quietly brilliant portrait of immigrant life… Children of the Revolution reads like an Ethopian variation on The Great Gatsby. Remarkably it’s not diminished by this comparison
Financial Times

Dinaw Mengestu belongs to that special group of American voices produced by global upheavals and intentional, if sometimes forced, migrations. These are the writer-immigrants coming here from Africa, East India, Eastern Europe and elsewhere. Their struggles for identity mark a new turn within the ranks of American writers I like to call 'the in-betweeners.' The most interesting work in American literature has often been done by such writers, their liminality and luminosity in American culture produced by changing national definitions (Twain, Kerouac, Ginsberg), by being the children of immigrants themselves (Bellow, Singer), by voluntary exile (Baldwin, Hemingway) and by trauma (Bambara, Morrison).
Los Angeles Times Book Review

The immigrant’s plight is sensitively captured… But this is not a story of hopelessness – rather, it’s the gritty determination and the dark wit…and perspicacity with which Sepha can view his adopted homeland that make this a rich, moving read
Siobhan Murphy, Metro

a quietly brilliant portrait of immigrant life…It reads like an Ethopian variation on The Great Gatsby. Remarkably it’s not diminished by this comparison.
Financial Times, Financial Times

a quietly accomplished debut novel… he bestows an immense dignity, never sentimentalising their plight. Despite, or perhaps because of, the attritions of his years in exile, Sepha has remained astonishingly tender. Although occasionally despairing, he has not yet lost the ability to love. In the end, it is this human warmth that triumphs...
Guardian, Guardian

Quietly accomplished
Guardian

Mengestu’s hero is brilliantly realised.. a courageous and engaging novel
Daily Telegraph, Daily Telegraph

With faultless pitch and tone, this elegiac fist novel packs great matters into its modest span
Boyd Tonkin, Independent

Sharp and moving
Kate Saunders, The Times

The Exile's TaleOut of Africa, but not quite into America

What a fiction writer does, says Grace Paley, is 'illuminate what'shidden' - and that's exactly what Ethiopian-born Dinaw Mengestu does in TheBeautiful Things That Heaven Bears (Riverhead), his tender, enthrallingdebut novel about the hidden lives of immigrants who are caught between thebrutal Africa they have fled and an America that will not full admit them.In a quiet prose that is as moving as it is mournful, Mengestu delivers thistale of exile through the voice of Sepha Stephanos, who fled his nativeEthiopia during the Red Terror, when thousands of his fellow countrymen,including his father, were killed. Seventeen years later, he finds himselfliving alone in a poor black neighborhood in Washington, D.C., theproprietor of a failing, run-down grocery. Unlike his immigrant friends,who dream of brighter futures, Sepha wants no more than this, at least notat first. But when he begins to draw close to his new neighbors-a whiteacademic and her biracial daughter, harbingers of his neighborhood's firstfraught wave of gentrification-he briefly and painfully allows himself thefirst feelings of family that he has dared in years. Through Sepha's story,Mengestu brilliantly illuminates both the trauma of exile and the ways inwhich so many of us are still looking for home in America.
Richard McCann, O - Oprah Magazine