This month, we’re reading novels that examine how cultures and identities can collide, whether in Washington, D.C.’s modern-day Ethiopian American community or the mountains of pre-World War I Prussia.

Dinaw Mengestu (Knopf, 272 pp., $28, July 2024)

This month, we’re reading novels that examine how cultures and identities can collide, whether in Washington, D.C.’s modern-day Ethiopian American community or the mountains of pre-World War I Prussia.

Dinaw Mengestu (Knopf, 272 pp., $28, July 2024)

Dinaw Mengestu’s latest novel, Someone Like Us, follows a well-trodden narrative framework: A trip home for the holidays goes awry. Protagonist Mamush, an Ethiopian American journalist based in Paris, visits his mother in the “sprawling empire of the D.C. suburbs,” only to discover that Samuel, a father-cum-uncle figure, has died unexpectedly by suicide.

From there, the story shape-shifts to become anything but typical.

On the surface, the plot follows Mamush’s attempts to understand who exactly Samuel was—and why he took his own life. But Mamush is an unreliable narrator and, as he bounces between memories, internal dialogues, and his imagination, it is unclear which anecdotes are real and which ones he concocts on the spot, perhaps in an attempt to come to terms with Samuel’s checkered past.

What the reader does glean is this: Mamush’s mother and Samuel were friends in Ethiopia, and Samuel is most likely Mamush’s biological father, although he later married another woman. In the D.C. area, where the four of them settled, Samuel worked as an ambitious taxi driver, eager to make it in America. But he battles alcoholism and drug addiction, finding his way to a halfway house before his untimely death. Samuel also has a criminal history, though the details are unclear.

In the process of revealing these various fragments, Mengestu—who is himself Ethiopian American—provides jarring reflections on immigration, Black African identity, addiction, mental illness, and family, among other charged topics.

“I didn’t live in the world of happy and unhappy childhoods, happy and unhappy families,” Mamush explains, “we did what we had to do and never considered........

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