Mengestu's most impressive examination yet of the African diaspora . . . Worlds on a cusp, powerfully drawn: notable above all is Mengestu's desperately moving portrait of a compromised friendship.
Sunday Telegraph
Elegiac and beautifully written . . . Mengestu skilfully locates this individual love story in the long shadow cast by the rise of dictatorial regimes across Africa in the turbulent decades that followed the end of imperial rule.
Financial Times
Deeply moving . . . Mengestu addresses, with great lyricism and ferocity, the same themes of exile and loss that animated his two earlier novels . . . he is concerned here not only with the dislocations experienced by immigrants, but also with broader questions of identity: how individuals define themselves by their dreams, their choices, the place or places they call home.
New York Times
A story so straightforward but at the same time so mysterious that you can't turn the pages fast enough, and when you're done, your first impulse is to go back to the beginning and start over . . . The victories in this beautiful novel are hard fought and hard won, but won they are, and they are durable.
New York Times Book Review
What's fascinating about All Our Names is the unsettling way it engages with history - both the history of Uganda and literary history . . . Mengestu is rapidly becoming a writer on the global stage.
Guardian
A tale about human universals, in this case the universal longing for justice and our seemingly universal inability to achieve it without becoming unjust ourselves . . . Weighted with sorrow and gravitas, another superb story by Mengestu, who is among the best novelists now at work in America.
Kirkus Reviews (starred)