Award-winning Ethiopian-American author Meron Hadero’s gorgeously wrought stories in A Down Home Meal for These Difficult Times offer poignant, compelling narratives of those whose lives have been marked by border crossings and the risk of displacement.
Set across the United States and abroad, Meron Hadero’s stories feature immigrants, refugees, and those on the brink of dispossession, all struggling to begin again, all fighting to belong. Moving through diverse geographies and styles, this captivating collection follows characters on the journey toward home, which they dream of, create and redefine, lose and find, and make their own. Beyond migration, these stories examine themes of race, gender, class, friendship, betrayal, the despair of loss, and the enduring resilience of hope.
“The Street Sweep,” winner of the 2021 AKO Caine Prize for African Writing, is about an enterprising young man on the verge of losing his home in Addis Ababa who pursues an improbable opportunity to turn his life around.
Appearing in Best American Short Stories, “The Suitcase” follows a woman visiting her country of origin for the first time and finds that an ordinary object opens up an unexpected, complex bridge between worlds.
Shortlisted for the 2019 Caine Prize, “The Wall” portrays the intergenerational friendship between two refugees living in Iowa who have connections to Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall.
A Best American Short Stories notable, “Mekonnen aka Mack aka Huey Freakin’ Newton” is a coming-of-age tale about an Ethiopian immigrant in Brooklyn encountering nuances of race in his new country.
Kaleidoscopic, powerful, and illuminative, the stories in A Down Home Meal for These Difficult Times expand our understanding of the essential and universal need for connection and the vital refuge of home, from the major new talent Meron Hadero.
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“Meron Hadero’s collection brims with lives on the margins, collisions that do not fully happen, redemptions thwarted at the last minute. Yet, it is through these moments that the vastness of the modern lives of immigrants are examined and fully revealed. This style…makes Hadero a new master of the form, and this collection a masterful one.”
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Chigozie Obioma, author of An Orchestra of Minorities