How to Read the Air
by Dinaw Mengestu
Reconstructing a father through his parents' journey.
you carry a parent's unspoken history in your body and are trying to figure out what it means
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Jonas's parents drove from Nashville to Peoria on their honeymoon in 1977 — his Ethiopian father, his mother, a car, a route that became the site of violence he never spoke of. Thirty years later Jonas reconstructs that journey to understand his father, his marriage, himself. Mengestu moves between Ethiopia under the Derg, the American Midwest, and contemporary New York — showing how migration shapes not just the people who make the journey but everyone who comes after them. A dispatch about inherited trauma before anyone called it that.
WHERE THIS BOOK LIVES
- Setting
- Ethiopia • East Africa
- Voice
- Written by a Ethiopian author
- Themes
- Witness
