the beautiful things that heaven bears by dinaw mengestu

Mengestu adds chiaroscuro with the story of Stephanos's 17-year exile from his family and country following his father's murder by revolutionary soldiers. Just as unexpected is Sepha's friendship with Judith's biracial 11-year-old daughter, Naomi (one of the book's most vivid characters), over a copy of The Brothers Karamazov Set over eight months in a gentrifying Washington, D.C., neighborhood in the 1970s, it captures an uptick in Ethiopian grocery store owner Sepha Stephanos's long-deferred hopes, as Judith, a white academic, fixes up the four-story house next to his apartment building, treats him to dinner and lets him steal a kiss. ( From the publisher.Barely suppressed despair and black wit infuse this beautifully observed debut from Ethiopian émigré Mengestu. 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. But when the neighborhood's newfound calm is disturbed by a series of racial incidents, Sepha may lose everything all over again. 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.

Soon Sepha's neighborhood begins to change. He realizes that his life has turned out completely different and far more isolated from the one he had imagined for himself years ago. His only companions are two fellow African immigrants who share his feelings of frustration with and bitter nostalgia for their home continent. Now he finds himself running a grocery store in a poor African-American neighborhood in Washington, D.C. 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.

The beautiful things that heaven bears by dinaw mengestu