Early in One Battle After Another, the director Paul Thomas Anderson's Oscar-winning tale of insurgency in slow decline, Pat Calhoun, a guerrilla explosives expert played by Leonardo DiCaprio, makes a choice that sets the course of both his life and the movie: He picks parenthood over radicalism. As Pat drives into the night with his infant daughter snuggled in a laundry basket, viewers understand that he has forsaken one set of ideals'and battles'for another. A very similar decision animates Bsrat Mezghebe's debut novel, I Hope You Find What You're Looking For. Its protagonist, Elsa Haddish, is a former Eritrean People's Liberation Front guerrilla now living with her daughter, Lydia, in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. Lydia's father died in the war, and Elsa is the only former fighter in the D.C. area's large Eritrean diaspora. Her community admires her militant past, but she considers herself a failure. When the novel starts, in 1991, Eritrea's 30-year war to free itself from...
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