Mailbox Monday - August 30

Mailbox Monday is hosted by Marcia at The Printed Page.
We share what books that we found in our mailboxes last week.
I got 2 books in my mailbox. Here they are:

How to Read the Air

by Dinaw Mengestu

Received this uncorrected proof from Shelf Awareness
This book goes on sale October 14Goodreads Description:
Dinaw Mengestu’s first novel The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears earned the young writer comparisons to Bellow, Fitzgerald, and Naipaul and garnered ecstatic critical praise and awards around the world for its haunting depiction of the immigrant experience in America. Now, he enriches the themes that defined his debut in a story that captures two generations of an immigrant family.

One early September afternoon, Yosef and Mariam, young Ethiopian immigrants who have spent all but their first year of marriage apart, set off on a road trip from their new home in Peoria, Illinois to Nashville, Tennessee, in search of their new identity as an American couple. Just months later, their son Jonas is born in Illinois. Thirty years later, Yosef has died, and Jonas is desperate to make sense of the volatile generational and cultural ties that have forged him. How can he envision his future without knowing what has come before? Leaving behind his marriage and job in New York, Jonas sets out to retrace his parents’ trip and in a stunning display of imagination, weaves together a family history that takes him from the war-torn Ethiopia of his parents’ youth to a brighter vision of his life in the America of today, a story—real or invented—that holds the possibility of reconciliation and redemption.

A heartbreaking literary masterwork about love, family, and the power of imagination, How to Read the Air confirms Dinaw Mengestu's reputation as one of the brightest talents of his generation.

You Don't Look Like Anyone I Know

by Heather Sellers

I received this uncorrected proof from Shelf Awareness
This book goes on sale on October 14

Goodreads Description:
This is an unusual and uncommonly moving family memoir, with a twist that gives new meaning to hindsight, insight, and forgiveness.

Heather Sellers is face-blind -- that is, she has prosopagnosia -- a rare neurological condition that prevents her from reliably recognizing people's faces. Growing up, unaware of the reason for her perpetual confusion and anxiety, she took what cues she could from speech, hairstyle, and gait. But she sometimes kissed a stranger, thinking he was her boyfriend, or failed to recognize even her own father and mother. She feared she must be crazy.

Yet it was her mother who nailed windows shut and covered them with blankets, made her daughter walk on her knees to spare the carpeting, and had her practice secret words to use in the likely event of abduction. Her father went on weeklong ''fishing trips'' (aka benders), took in drifters, and wore panty hose and bras under his regular clothes. Heather clung to a barely coherent story of a ''normal'' childhood in order to survive the one she had.

That fairy tale unraveled two decades later when Heather took the man she would marry home to meet her parents and began to discover the truth about her family and about herself. As she came at last to trust her own perceptions, she learned the gift of perspective: that embracing the past as it is allows us to let it go. She illuminated a deeper truth -- that even in the most flawed circumstances, love may be seen and felt.