Before he can retire, Las Vegas detective Salazar is determined to solve a
recent spate of murders. When he encounters a pair of conjoined twins with a
container of blood near their car, he’s sure he has apprehended the killers, and
enlists the help of Dr. Sunil Singh, a South African transplant who specializes
in the study of psychopaths. As Sunil tries to crack the twins, the implications
of his research grow darker. Haunted by his betrayal of loved ones back home
during apartheid, he seeks solace in the love of Asia, a prostitute with hopes
of escaping that life. But Sunil’s own troubled past is fast on his heels in the
form of a would-be assassin.Suspenseful through the last page, The Secret History of Las Vegas is Chris Abani’s most accomplished work to date, with his trademark visionary prose and a striking compassion for the inner lives of outsiders.
From acclaimed author Dinaw Mengestu, a recipient of the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 award, TheNew 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.
