A Down Home Meal for These Difficult Times

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.


Genre: Literary Fiction

"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

"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

"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

"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

"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