Dinaw Mengestu

Dinaw Mengestu: "On the most cliched level, our idea of the immigrant narrative is ... the person who comes to the U.S. is happy to be there, gets a job, gets a car, gets a house. And then they go through the process of success," the author said during a recent interview, according to Times Colonist. Set in the early 1970s, "All Our Names" Doubleday is told through the dual perspectives of Helen a social worker from a small Midwestern town and "Isaac," the mysterious African student with whom she falls desperately in love. Isaac's narrative traces his previous life as a student in post-independence Uganda, and slowly reveals the truth about his identity and Ethiopian-American novelist Dinaw Mengestu says he wanted his new novel "All Our Names" to break from the traditional immigrant tale. "I've always been curious about the immigrants who don't want to necessarily be there ... plenty of people end up in other countries because they have to, because that's their way of surviving. ... People who come to their new country not because this is their dream but because their nightmare has become true." (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.