Vroege RecensentenKorey Jackson

A winner of the Coretta Scott King/John Steptoe Award, Kekla Magoon has established herself as one of the most powerful voices in YA fiction. In this hard-hitting work, a 16-year-old black youth is killed by a white shooter, leaving his community to struggle for answers—and meaning—in the aftermath. (Fiction/Ages 12 and up) “Magoon masterfully captures the cycle of urban violence and the raw emotions of the young people who can’t escape its impact.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review When sixteen-year-old Tariq Johnson dies from two gunshot wounds, his community is thrown into an uproar. Tariq was black. The shooter, Jack Franklin, is white. In the aftermath of Tariq’s death, everyone has something to say, but no two accounts of the events line up. Day by day, new twists further obscure the truth. Tariq’s friends, family, and community struggle to make sense of the tragedy, and to cope with the hole left behind when a life is cut short. In their own words, they grapple for a way to say with certainty: This is how it went down.

An author of rare and shining talent, Dinaw Mengestu has received a MacArthur Foundation genius grant and New Yorker’s 20 Under 40 Award. All Our Names follows a young African revolutionary who takes the guise of an exchange student and begins a new life in America—only to discover the inexorable shredding of his present by the demons of his past. Fiction “Mengestu portrays the intersection of cultures … with unsettling perception.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review From acclaimed author Dinaw Mengestu, a recipient of the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 award, The New Yorker’s 20 Under 40 award, and a 2012 MacArthur Foundation genius grant, comes an unforgettable love story about a searing affair between an American woman and an African man in 1970s America and an unflinching novel about the fragmentation of lives that straddle countries and histories. All Our Names is the story of two young men who come of age during an African revolution, drawn from the safe confines of the university campus into the intensifying clamor of the streets outside. But as the line between idealism and violence becomes increasingly blurred, the friends are driven apart—one into the deepest peril, as the movement gathers inexorable force, and the other into the safety of exile in the American Midwest. There, pretending to be an exchange student, he falls in love with a social worker and settles into small-town life. Yet this idyll is inescapably darkened by the secrets of his past: the acts he committed and the work he left unfinished. Most of all, he is haunted by the beloved friend he left behind, the charismatic leader who first guided him to revolution and then sacrificed everything to ensure his freedom. Elegiac, blazing with insights about the physical and emotional geographies that circumscribe our lives, All Our Names is a marvel of vision and tonal command. Writing within the grand tradition of Naipul, Greene, and Achebe, Mengestu gives us a political novel that is also a transfixing portrait of love and grace, of self-determination and the names we are given and the names we earn.