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All Our Names
All Our Names | Dinaw Mengestu
6 posts | 10 read | 15 to read
From acclaimed author Dinaw Mengestu, a recipient of the National Book Foundations 5 Under 35 award, The New Yorkers 20 Under 40 award, and a 2012 MacArthur Foundation genius grant, comes an unforgettable love story about a searing affair between an American woman and an African man in 1970s America and an unflinching novel about the fragmentation of lives that straddle countries and histories. All Our Names is the story of two young men who come of age during an African revolution, drawn from the safe confines of the university campus into the intensifying clamor of the streets outside. But as the line between idealism and violence becomes increasingly blurred, the friends are driven apartone into the deepest peril, as the movement gathers inexorable force, and the other into the safety of exile in the American Midwest. There, pretending to be an exchange student, he falls in love with a social worker and settles into 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 beloved friend he left behind, the charismatic leader who first guided him to revolution and then sacrificed everything to ensure his freedom. Elegiac, blazing with insights about the physical and emotional geographies that circumscribe our lives, All Our Names is a marvel of vision and tonal command. Writing within the grand tradition of Naipul, Greene, and Achebe, Mengestu gives us a political novel that is also a transfixing portrait of love and grace, of self-determination and the names we are given and the names we earn.This eBook edition includes a Reading Group Guide.
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review
ElectricKatyLand
All Our Names | Dinaw Mengestu
Pickpick

Wow. I listened to this as an audiobook. Very powerful dual-narrated story about civil war in Uganda, post-colonialism, and the small town US Midwest in the 60s.

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Alicia
All Our Names | Dinaw Mengestu
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Well you guys I haven't bought a book in forever (okay except on my mini-vacation I did go to the Tattered Cover in Denver). But these were literally $1 at the Dollar Tree. $1!!! Can you believe it?!

Notafraidofwords I love AON! (edited) 7y
AbstractMonica I loved Burial Rites 7y
LeahBergen 👏🏻👏🏻 7y
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Dragon 👍 7y
Alicia @Notafraidofwords that's the only one I hadn't really heard of! Glad you liked it 7y
Alicia @AbstractMonica that one has been on my TBR forever! Can't wait to read it 7y
saguarosally I haven't bought a book in 30 seconds. 7y
63 likes7 comments
review
mhippo
All Our Names | Dinaw Mengestu
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Pickpick

There's a dreamlike quality to this story, and something about that seems to capture both the disorientation of extreme political violence and the innocence of those who find themselves surrounded by it. I had a visceral dislike for the social worker character, maybe because her escapist, objectifying tendencies felt a little too real. Overall a great, important story and I'm glad I stuck with it till the end.

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mhippo
All Our Names | Dinaw Mengestu
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Been giving this another go, and enjoying it more than I expected. There are some great moments that reveal a lot of complexity... Glad I tried again (on a day when not so easily triggered by racial tropes, I guess).

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mhippo
All Our Names | Dinaw Mengestu
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Reading for a book group. Not sure where this is going- maybe I'm not in a good space for a potential white-savior social worker narrative tonight (or ever)... I'm more than skeptical. Anyone else read this?

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