The Penguin Speakers Bureau

In THE BEAUTIFUL THINGS THAT HEAVEN BEARS, Dinaw Mengestu has crafted a brilliant and deeply affecting debut novel about what it means to lose a family and a country—and what it takes to create a new home.

Mengestu was selected a winner of the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 Award, as well as the 2008 Lannan Literary Fellowship, The Guardian First Book Award in the U.K., and France’s Prix du Premier Roman Etranger. THE BEAUTIFUL THINGS THAT HEAVEN BEARS was named a New York Times Book Review Notable Book of 2007, one of Amazon.com’s top ten novels of the year, and Lire Magazine’s Twenty Best Novels of the Year.

Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, said of Mengestu’s novel, “I was profoundly moved by this tale of an Ethiopian immigrant’s search for acceptance, peace, and identity.”

Dinaw Mengestu was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1978. In 1980, he immigrated to the United States. A graduate of Georgetown University and Columbia University’s MFA program in fiction, and the recipient of the 2006 fellowship in fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Mengestu has written for Rolling Stone, among other publications.