Book News | Dinaw Mengestu is a L. A. Times Book Prize Winner
On Friday, April 25, 2008 at 8 PM PST, UCLA’s Royce Hall was all the buzz as the 28th Annual L. A. Times Book Awards were presented. Congratulations to all the winners! One winner in particular we want to call special attention to is Dinaw Mengestu for winning the Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction for The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears.
Other awards this book has received :
- Winner of the Guardian First Book Prize
- New York Times Notable Book
- Winner of the National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35” Award
- Recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship
- Winner of the Prix du Premier Roman
- Named the Seattle Reads Selection of 2008
The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears
Dinaw Mengestu
Riverhead, March 2007
$22.95 US; ISBN: 1594489408 (Hardcover)
$14.00 US; ISBN: 1594482854 (Softcover)
About the Book
Seventeen years ago, Sepha Stephanos fled the Ethiopian Revolution after witnessing soldiers beat his father to the point of certain death, selling off his parents’ jewelry to pay for passage to the United States. Now he finds himself running a grocery store in a poor African-American neighborhood in Washington, D.C. His only companions are two fellow African immigrants who share his feelings of frustration with and bitter nostalgia for their home continent. He realizes that his life has turned out completely different and far more isolated from the one he had imagined for himself years ago.
Soon Sepha’s neighborhood begins to change. Hope comes in the form of new neighbors-Judith and Naomi, a white woman and her biracial daughter-who become his friends and remind him of what having a family is like for the first time in years. But when the neighborhood’s newfound calm is disturbed by a series of racial incidents, Sepha may lose everything all over again.
Told in a haunting and powerful first-person narration that casts the streets of Washington, D.C., and Addis Ababa through Sepha’s eyes, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears is a deeply affecting and unforgettable debut novel about what it means to lose a family and a country-and what it takes to create a new home.
About the Author
Dinaw Mengestu is the author of The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, a Los Angeles Times bestseller and Seattle Reads pick of 2008, as well as the forthcoming novel How To Read the Air . He was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1978. In 1980, he immigrated to the United States with his mother and sister, joining his father, who had fled Ethiopia during the Red Terror. He is a graduate of Georgetown University and Columbia University’s MFA program in fiction and the recipient of a 2006 fellowship in fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts and a 5 Under 35 Award from the National Book Foundation in 2007. He has written for Rolling Stone and
