ABOUT THE BOOK

Barely suppressed despair and black wit infuse this beautifully observed debut from Ethiopian emigre Dinaw Mengestu. 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. 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. 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. After long days in the dusty, barely profitable shop, Sepha's two friends, Joseph from Congo and Kenneth from Kenya, joke with Sepha about African dictators and gently mock his romantic aspirations, while the neighborhood's loaded racial politics hang over Sepha and Judith's burgeoning relationship like a sword of Damocles. The novel's dirge-like tone may put off readers looking for the next Kite Runner, but Mengestu's assured prose and haunting set pieces (especially a series of letters from Stephanos's uncle to Jimmy Carter, pleading that he respect "the deep friendship between our two countries") are heart-rending and indelible. -Publishers Weekly

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dinaw Mengestu 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 the communist revolution in Ethiopia two years before. He is a graduate of Georgetown University and of Columbia University's MFA program in fiction. He is the recipient of a 2006 fellowship in fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts. The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears is his first novel He has also recently reported stories for Harper's and Jane magazine, profiling a young woman who was kidnapped and forced to become a soldier in the brutal war in Uganda, and for Rolling Stone on the tragedy in Darfur. The Lannan Visiting Writer at Georgetown University for spring 2007, Mengestu lives in New York City.

BEYOND THE BOOK

Read an Author Interview
Read an Interview with Dinaw Mengestu aired on PBS.
Read the Rolling Stone article The Tragedy of Darfur written by Dinaw Mengestu.
Read a wonderful piece about Dinaw Mengestu in The Washington Post.
Read The New York Times Book Review of this novel.

The apt title of this novel is from Dante Alighieri's epic poem The Divine Comedy. In one of the most powerful moments in the poem, as the poet emerges from Hell with his guide, Virgil, he gives us one of the most accurate descriptions of the emotions attached to escaping such a bleak environment and rediscovering the meaning of beauty.

We climbed up, he first and I second, so far that through a round opening I saw some of the beautiful things that Heaven bears; and thence we issued forth to see again the stars.