Someone Like Us by Dinaw Mengestu

I found this book to be a little bit confusing when it opened, and by the end I felt like I finally had a handle on where it was going all along. It opens with a sudden death of a man, Samuel, in the United States. He was working as a taxi driver and died under suspicious circumstances. He was by all accounts a witty yet enigmatic Ethiopian immigrant whom Mamush, our journalist hero, thinks of as his father. When he learns of Samuel’s death, Manush leaves his wife and child behind in France and returns to the close-knit Ethiopian community in Washington DC that shaped his childhood. He’s propelled by feelings of personal grief, but also a professional urge to investigate the truth--but the more he learns, the less he understands and the more he sees that he knew only part of the story of Samuel's life. Samuel’s ambitions in America were never realized, and thoughts of his past life in Ethiopia left him feeling stuck in a state of not-quite-belonging, an in-between-ness that is a familiar story for immigrants, being betwixt and between, and Mamush of course figures out some things about himself as he seeks out Samuel's story.