After abandoning his once-promising career as a journalist in search of a new life in Paris, Mamush meets Hannah, a photographer. Now, five years later, with his marriage to Hannah on the verge of collapse, he returns to the close-knit immigrant Ethiopian community of Washington, DC, that defined his childhood. At its center is Mamush’s stoic, implacable mother, and Samuel, the larger-than-life father figure whose ceaseless charm and humor have always served as a cover for a harder, more troubling truth. But on the same day that Mamush arrives home in Washington, Samuel is found dead in his garage. With Hannah and their two-year-old son back in Paris, Mamush sets out on an unexpected journey across America in search of answers to questions he'd been told never to ask.

Dinaw Mengestu’s new novel is set in the 1970s and alternates between two radically different environments: the violence-torn landscape of Idi Amin’s Uganda, and the bucolic Midwestern college town to which one of the refugees from Kampala immigrates. As in his two earlier novels, Mengestu’s elegiac writing dramatizes the struggles of African exiles trying to conform to American life while grappling with memories of the horrors they witnessed in their home continent.