The Anglo-Ethiopian Society

Book Club - ONLINE - A Down Home Meal for These Difficult Times

Meron Hadero

Tuesday 31st January 2023

Online event starting at 19:00 BST - Public event (all welcome to join).

Note - Register for the event on Eventbrite and you'll be emailed a Zoom link shortly before the event.


For this book club we're going to discuss A Down Home Meal for These Difficult Times by Meron Hadero.

Winner of the 2020 Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing and the 2021 AKO Caine Prize for African Writing, 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 U.S. 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 and betrayal, the despair of loss and the enduring resilience of hope.

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—and announce a major new talent in Meron Hadero.

Meron Hadero is an Ethiopian American who was born in Addis Ababa and came to the U.S. via Germany as a young child. Meron's short stories have won the 2021 Caine Prize for African Writing, shortlisted for the 2019 Caine Prize for African Writing, and appear in Best American Short Stories, Ploughshares, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Zyzzyva, The Iowa Review, Missouri Review, 40 Short Stories: A Portable Anthology, and others. She's also been published in The New York Times Book Review, the anthology The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives, and will appear in the forthcoming anthology Letter to a Stranger: Essays to the Ones Who Haunt Us. A 2019-2020 Steinbeck Fellow at San Jose State University, and a fellow at Yaddo, Ragdale, and MacDowell, Meron holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan, a JD from Yale Law School, and a BA in history from Princeton with a certificate in American studies.


Book a place using Eventbrite in order to be sent a link to the session. More registration details are on the Eventbrite page.

Eventbrite Tickets - Bookclub - A Down Home Meal for These Difficult Time by Meron Hadero



A Down Home Meal for These Difficult Time cover A Down Home Meal for These Difficult Times by Meron Hadero

Publisher : Canongate, December 2022
ISBN : 9781838858919 (paperback)
UK price £14.99

A Down Home Meal for These Difficult Times was first published by Restless Books in the USA.

First Published in News File Summer 2022

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