Bøger af Maaza Mengiste

An utterly captivating novel about female strength. Set during Mussolini's 1935 invasion of Ethiopia, The Shadow King casts a light on the women soldiers written out of African history

Beneath the Lion's Gaze opens in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 1974, on the eve of a revolution. Yonas kneels in his mother's prayer room, pleading to his god for an end to the violence that has wracked his family and country.

In this monumental novel, Maaza Mengiste investigates the erased lives of the women who participated in the war of resistance against the fascist Italian invasion that began in 1935 in her native Ethiopia. Through the characters of The shadow king -complex and full of edges, with their lights and their shadows- Mengiste reveals the serious consequences of omnipresent violence, one that leaves deep scars, just like the one in the neck of Hirut, the protagonist of this novel. The Mussolini regime, complicit in the Nazi extermination plan, has no qualms about similar violence against Ethiopians in the war of occupation. But there is also other violence that falls on the women protagonists of this story, victims of a patriarchal society in which girls are subjected to forced marriages, sexual violence within marriage is normalized and servitude is accepted without any kind of questioning. Hirut tells Ettore: Hear the dead louder and louder: We must be heard. We have to be remembered. We must be known. And with it the torrent of memory is unleashed. Let yourself be carried away by it and discover this epic novel without glory or heroes, this deed that abhors violence, this story of a war full of duels and wounds, a memory that caresses scars.

This memorable, heartbreaking story opens in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 1974, on the eve of a revolution. Yonas kneels in his mother's prayer room, pleading to his god for an end to the violence that has wracked his family and country. His father, Hailu, a prominent doctor, has been ordered to report to jail after helping a victim of state-sanctioned torture to die. And Dawit, Hailu's youngest son, has joined an underground resistance movement-a choice that will lead to more upheaval and bloodshed across a ravaged Ethiopia.Beneath the Lion's Gaze tells a gripping story of family, of the bonds of love and friendship set in a time and place that has rarely been explored in fiction. It is a story about the lengths human beings will go in pursuit of freedom and the human price of a national revolution. Emotionally gripping, poetic, and indelibly tragic, Beneath The Lion's Gaze is a transcendent and powerful debut.

Set during Mussolini's 1935 invasion of Ethiopia, The Shadow King takes us back to the first real conflict of World War II, casting light on the women soldiers who were left out of the historical record. At its heart is orphaned maid Hirut, who finds herself tumbling into a new world of thefts and violations, of betrayals and overwhelming rage. What follows is a heartrending and unputdownable exploration of what it means to be a woman at war.