I HOPE YOU FIND WHAT YOU ARE LOOKING FOR

An engrossing family saga that explores the secrets of three Eritrean women living in the
DC suburbs.

In the spring of 1991 Mama Zewdi, Elsa and Lydia find themselves just as preoccupied with the recent news of Eritrean independence as they are with their attempts to find love and meaning in their lives. Mama Zewdi, the formidable matriarch and a successful entrepreneur, regrets never having married or birthed a child, and contemplates starting her own family. Elsa, a former guerrilla fighter in the thirty-year war for independence, finds it challenging to let go of the past as she continues to grapple with the death of her child's father and the best friend she left behind in the war. Lydia, Elsa's introverted teenage daughter, questions her mother's account of her past and finds solace in Berekhet, a charismatic cousin sent to the US to live with them. Over the course of the novel, we ache for the ways these three women struggle to come to terms with their pain and their losses and we cheer them on in celebrating their joys.
Told from alternating points of view, spanning countries and time periods, and incorporating surprising flashes of humor, I Hope You Find What You're Looking For is a riveting read that takes us into the heart of an Eritrean immigrant community and poignantly reveals how these memorable women define home and family for themselves.
Bsrat Mezghebe is a writer from Washington, DC. Her essays about family and migration have appeared in Guernica, The Paris Review, and the anthology Well-Read Black Girl: Finding Our Stories, Discovering Ourselves (Penguin Random House). She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from New York University.