A Down Home Meal for These Difficult Times
Meron Hadero
Available as Paperback, eBook
A poignant and compelling collection of short stories about those whose lives have been marked by the risk of displacement, from the winner of the AKO Caine Prize
WINNER OF THE HURSTON/WRIGHT LEGACY AWARD FOR DEBUT FICTION 2023
SHORTLISTED FOR THE MUSEUM OF AFRICAN DIASPORA AFRICAN LITERARY AWARD 2023
FINALIST FOR THE PEN/ROBERT W. BINGHAM PRIZE FOR DEBUT SHORT STORY COLLECTION 2023
FINALIST FOR THE CHAUTAUQUA PRIZE 2023
LONGLISTED FOR THE STORY PRIZE 2023
‘Witty and wistful, complex and heartbreaking’ Brit Bennett
An enterprising young man on the verge of losing his home in Addis Ababa pursues an improbable opportunity to turn his life around. A woman visiting her country of origin for the first time finds that an ordinary object opens up an unexpected, complex bridge between worlds. An intergenerational friendship forms between two refugees living in Iowa who have connections to Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall.
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.
“These stories capture lives caught between cultures and continents, past and present, truth and lies. As its displaced characters seek belonging, this collection explores the challenges of connection with empathy and nuance. A thrilling debut”
Brit Bennett
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“Wonderful, wise stories [capturing] the experience of dislocation and loneliness”
daily Mail
“Shines with potent, affecting moments”
independent
”A Down Home Meal for These Difficult Times held me spellbound, riveted to the compelling characters that walk through these pages, all of them guided by Meron’s revelatory and generous examinations of belonging and displacement”
Maaza Mengiste
“Brims with lives on the margins, collisions that do not fully happen, redemptions thwarted at the last minute … This style, which time and time again comes off the page as truly effortless, is what makes Hadero a new master of the form, and this collection a masterful one”
Chigozie Obioma
Meron Hadero
Meron Hadero is an Ethiopian-American who was born in Addis Ababa and came to the US via Germany as a young child. Meron’s short stories have won the AKO Caine Prize for African Writing, and appear in Best American Short Stories, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, 40 Short Stories: A Portable Anthology and others. She was a contributor to The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Live and has been published in the New York Times. A 2019– 2020 Steinbeck Fellow at San Jose State University, Meron holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan, a JD from Yale Law School (Washington State Bar) and a BA in history from Princeton with a certificate in American studies.
@meronhadero | meronhadero.com