How to Read the Air

Nov 6, 2025 11:20 PM

Author:Dinaw Mengestu

How to Read the Air

A powerful and moving summer read that explores love, grief and the reality of the contemporary American immigrant experience

Jonas, fresh from a failed marriage, is desperate to make sense of the ties that have forged him. How can he dream of a future when he can't make sense of his past? He hits the road, tracing the route that his parents - young Ethiopians in search of an identity as an American couple - took thirty years earlier to Nashville, Tennessee.

In a stunning display of imagination he weaves together a history that takes him from the war-torn Ethiopia of his parents' youth to a brighter vision of his own life in contemporary America, a story - real or invented- that holds the possibility of reconciliation and redemption.

‘A story of exile and redemption, beautifully written’ The Times

Reviews

A straight-forward, compassionate, keenly sensitive observer of real life

—— James Lasdun , Guardian

A story of exile and redemption, beautifully written

—— Kate Saunders , The Times

[Mengestu has] pulled off a narrative sleight of hand, weaving two - or is it three? - beautiful fictions, while reminding us subtly that the most seductive may be the least true

—— Los Angeles Times

How To Read the Air is deeply thought out, deliberate in its craftsmanship and in many parts beautifully written...remarkably talented

—— Miguel Syjuco , The Scotsman

Challenging

—— Peter Carty , Independent

Mengestu's finely written novel, his second, tackles family, the break-up of a marriage and the reinvention of a past... Finely written novel

—— Sunday Times

It is a measure of the novel's ultimate success that the narrative has real drive, and also reminds us that fiction really does matter

—— Christopher Potter , Sunday Times, Culture

There's no denying its emotional heft

—— Sunday Business Post

Pullman is confronting readers with the horrors of our own world reflected back at us. In The Secret Commonwealth he creates a fearful symmetry

—— The Herald

Pullman has created a fantasy world, made yet more satisfying in this new volume. This is a book for getting older with

—— Guardian

REVIEWS FOR LA BELLE SAUVAGE: THE BOOK OF DUST VOLUME ONE:

Fans of His Dark Materials will find themselves joyfully immersed in a familiar world . . . meanwhile, awaiting first-time readers is all the pleasure of commencing their own journey into this most captivating of universes at the very beginning of Lyra's story

—— Independent

No one else writes like Pullman . . . entirely worth the 17-year wait

—— Imogen Russell Williams, Metro

A rich, imaginative, vividly characterised rite-of-passage tale

—— Nicolette Jones, The Sunday Times

High-octane adventure accompanies ingenious plotting

—— The Times

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