A Down Home Meal for These Difficult Times

Praise for A Down Home Meal for These Difficult Times:

“Witty and wistful, complex and heartbreaking, 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, bestselling author of The Vanishing Half and The Mothers

“This book heralds the arrival of a gifted, stunning writer. 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. These stories unfold with an intensifying power, each of them a testament to what’s possible when we move through this world insisting on the potential of hope, and love.”

—Maaza Mengiste, author of Booker Prize finalist The Shadow King

"Meron Hadero's collection, A Down Home Meal for These Difficult Times 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 (or the "transposed") are examined and fully revealed. 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, author of Booker Prize finalists An Orchestra of Minorities and The Fishermen

“Intricate and precise, A Down Home Meal for These Difficult Times casts a glimmering light into the most elusive corners of estrangement which all migrants—torn between past and present, home and journey—come to know. To say that Hadero’s style is discreet would be inaccurate; these stories lull, then rip you open. A powerful, unforgettable collection.”

—Ingrid Rojas Contreras, bestselling author of Fruit of the Drunken Tree

“Meron Hadero’s dazzling short stories span the diaspora, poignantly portraying characters in search of opportunity and belonging. Rich with insight, compassion, and wit, A Down Home Meal for These Difficult Times is an unforgettable debut.”

—Vanessa Hua, bestselling author of A River of Stars and Forbidden City

“With enormous power and wonderful subtlety, Meron Hadero grants us access to the inner worlds of people at moments when everything is at risk. In the stories that make up A Down Home Meal for These Difficult Times, the emotional stakes are high…. Hadero’s characters are usually out of place, struggling to move backward or forward to a place that resembles home.... That closeness to the edge—of safety, of the known and being known—will resonate with all of us whose lives have been marked by border-crossings, whether by choice or, more likely, because of complex political and environmental forces far beyond our control. As we enter a future that will be shaped more and more profoundly by such border crossings, these sharp, humane, beautiful portraits are a gift.”

—Dinaw Mengestu, Achy Obejas, and Ilan Stavans, from the judges’ citation

“Debut books don’t get much stronger than this. Meron Hadero’s remarkable stories explore a diverse cast of people doing their best to find acceptance or at least stability—a 10-year-old Ethiopian immigrant who befriends a German man in Iowa; a pair of refugees in New York determined to learn how to cook classic American food. Hadero is deeply perceptive; her dialogue always rings true, and the regard she has for her characters is apparent. This isn’t just an excellent first book, it’s an excellent book, period.”

— Michael Schaub, NPR Best Books 2022: Books We Love

“In her debut story collection, Addis Ababa–born Hadero addresses Ethiopian Americans' struggles for acceptance, the painful ties between present and past, and the elusive meaning of home…. Hadero sets a tone of dizzying displacement from the start…. A full range of stylistic approaches is on display in these stories…. Hadero's writing derives great power from her nuanced references to Ethiopia's anguished history, including the atrocities of the Derg military junta. As one character says, survival is about ‘letting that past move through you and move with you and move you so that it's you deciding for yourself what you're worth.’ Entertaining and affecting stories with a deft lightness of touch.”

—Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review

“In this impressive debut collection, award-winning Ethiopian American writer Hadero showcases the lives of displaced people trying to create a space for themselves to call home in America and Ethiopia…. Hadero’s powerful stories usher characters along their searches for belonging, often with nothing but hope and a sense of community pushing them forward.”

—Emily Park, Booklist, Starred Review

This richly detailed, subtly impressionistic short-story collection—by the first Ethiopian-born writer to win the AKO Caine Prize for African Writing—pulls at threads of geography, language, generation, race, and gender…Hadero’s page shines. She brings to bear aspects of her own path from Ethiopia to Germany to the United States, expanding instead of narrowing the range and representation of immigrant experiences. If displacement is a story of holding, it’s also, in Hadero’s telling, a holding of hope that readers and reporters, refugees or not, will unpack tropes instead of resort to them.

— Daniel King, Mother Jones

“Hadero’s characters face challenges including racism, crushing misunderstandings, and visits home that remind them of how much they no longer belong, if they ever did…. Despite their difficult circumstances, though, these characters find comfort in places like a single friend and a home-cooked meal. Their experiences may be unique, but their desires to live in peace and happiness are universal. A Down Home Meal for These Difficult Times is a heartfelt collection about the highs, lows, and ordinary of Ethiopian life.”

—Eileen Gonzalez, Foreword Reviews, Starred Review

Meron Hadero’s A Down Home Meal for These Difficult Times is an astonishing debut….If the danger faced by those who live on the anxious edge of societies, whether in Ethiopia or Germany or the United States, is not always—or even often—recognized, Hadero suggests, the signs are present long before they’re understood. In A Down Home Meal for These Difficult Times, she has crafted a profound collection that identifies this sensibility while also, in its overflow of stories, signaling the hope of a teller that a good listener will be ready to receive them.

— Anita Felicelli, Alta Journal

“It is the dignity that makes this collection a stunner.”

— Lauren Francis-Sharma, San Francisco Chronicle

“Displacement—often by outside force, rarely by personal choice—haunts Meron Hadero’s superb debut short story collection, A Down Home Meal for These Difficult Times, which won the 2020 Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing…. Hadero creates a remarkable universal resonance, exquisitely illuminating quotidian moments that could, and do, happen anywhere in the world where people long to belong, find community, and be welcomed.... In numerous stories, Hadero deftly examines what it means to be Black in America, especially as a transplant from another country…. In other stories, Hadero empathically and expertly explores living between cultures and countries…. [A] stupendous collection…. From narrative to narrative, Hadero is a wondrously agile writer, whether describing moments of triumphant anticipation (‘that January afternoon that was so steeped in hope that you could feel its warmth despite the numbing air’); shocking devastation (‘“No, no,” she said again, using her fist to argue for her life’); rightful contentment (‘as Yeshi and Jazarah stood ever more firmly on ground that had to be home’). Hadero’s prodigious storytelling is part testimony, part warning, part balm…. Joy—and perhaps a few tears, chuckles, gasps, sighs—awaits readers here, as well.”

—Terry Hong, Christian Science Monitor, 10 Best Books of June

“The dispossessed peoples of the world are explored in Ethiopian-born Hadero’s dazzling new story collection, which was awarded the Restless Prize for New Immigrant Writing. Her characters, many of them refugees, search for meaning, hope for the future and a place to call home. ‘Street Sweep’ won the AKO Caine Prize for African Writing and others were included in Best American Short Stories. Each story has a lyrical power. As the author says: 'To be receptive to what the story needs, I try to step back and almost hear what the story sounds like from a reader’s point of view.’ She is definitely a writer to watch.”

—The Center for Fiction, Bookstore Picks: Summer Arrivals