The publication from my local writers center mentions Dinaw Mengestu as among a group of new American writers whose "...novels, stories, poems, and plays have added a tremendous layer of richness to the vast quilt that is American literature." This book is not only a fantastic novel by a masterful young author. It is the new face of American literature, which is transitioning away from patrician New England, gothic Southern, and epic Western stories to embrace a new influx of humanity to this country. As the demographics of the nation change with recent arrivals from Africa, Asia, and India, the stories will also change.I loved this book even more than I loved Mengestu's first novel, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears. This novel weaves the story of Jonas, a young man in New York conditioned from childhood to be unobtrusive and nonconfrontational, with the story of his parents, immigrants from Ethiopia who settled in Illinois. His reserved nature and his cold relationship with his parents begins to contaminate his marriage to the beautiful Angela. Jonas, reflecting upon the need for a story as a way to find meaning, searches for the stories that make up his own life. Where he finds gaps, he begins to create stories to fill in the missing bits, imagining events in the lives of refugees from Africa or of his own parents before he was even born.The quest for the narrative in one's life is elusive yet essential to one's existence. It is how we keep the events and people in our lives close to us, carry them with us. "We persist and linger longer than we think, leaving traces of ourselves wherever we go," says Jonas. "If you take that away, then we all simply vanish."