Ethiopia

It was Only Yesterday

It was Only Yesterday is an insider's story about life as a royal teenager and growing up in the Jubilee Palace in Africa’s first royal family under the protective eyes of her great grand-father Emperor Haile Selassie I, King of Kings, Lion of Judah, and Elect of God. In February 1974, her privileged life comes to an abrupt end with the advent of a bloody upheaval which overthrows her great grand-father’s government and lands her mother and close family in a rotting Communist jail. By this time, Hannah Mariam has fled to United Kingdom where she is granted status as a refugee.

Interested in writing from a very young age, her first book It was Only Yesterday offers unique insights about the hardship she faced growing up in a new setting and how she effectively managed change and uncertainty. It was Only Yesterday is a delightful account of her interactions with friends and family in the backdrop of the intricate world of imperial protocol and palace politics. The book’s narrative is based on diaries kept over the past forty-three years, a collection of family photographs, informal chats and interviews, generational stories, and researching academic books about her great grand-father and family. A promising new author, her readers will enjoy how she has interwoven personal experiences with firsthand knowledge of her great grand-father, one of the world’s longest reigning monarchs and an important historical figure in Ethiopian, African and world history. The book’s memoir genre will appeal to all, in particular to those interested in understanding the cultural, social, political and historical ramifications of pre-socialist Ethiopia of 1974.

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Cutting for Stone

A sweeping, emotionally riveting novel with over 1 million copies sold—an enthralling family saga of Africa and America, doctors and patients, exile and home.

Marion and Shiva Stone are twin brothers born of a secret union between a beautiful Indian nun and a brash British surgeon. Orphaned by their mother’s death and their father’s disappearance, bound together by a connection and a shared fascination with medicine, the twins come of age as Ethiopia hovers on the brink of revolution.

Moving from Addis Ababa to NYC and back again, Cutting for Stone is an unforgettable story of two brothers whose fates are forever intertwined.
 
“A masterpiece. . . Verghese expertly weaves the threads of numerous story lines into one cohesive opus. The writing is graceful, the characters compassionate and the story full of nuggets of wisdom.” —San Francisco Chronicle
 
“Lush and exotic. . . Shows how history, landscape and accidents of birth conspire to create the story of a single life. . . . Verghese creates this story so lovingly that it is actually possible to live within it for the brief time one spends with this book. You may never leave the chair.” —LA Times
 
“Absorbing, exhilarating. . . . If you’re hungry for an epic . . . open the covers of Cutting for Stone, [then] don’t expect to do much else.” —The Seattle Times

(A special thank you to book club member, Christine Jensen for the suggestion.)

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Addis Ababa Noir

Named one of the Top African Books of 2020

Akashic Books continues its award-winning series of original anthologies. Each book comprises all new stories, each one set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the respective city.

What marks life in Addis Ababa are the starkly different realities coexisting in one place. It’s a growing city taking shape beneath the fraught weight of history, myth, and memory. It is a heady mix. It is in this space that the stories of Addis Ababa Noir reside . . .

Despite the varied and distinct voices in these pages, no single book can contain all of the wonderful, intriguing, vexing complexities of Addis Ababa. But what you will read are stories by some of Ethiopia’s most talented writers.

“Addis Ababa Noir is a beautiful read, and it succeeds in the historical excavation it undertakes . . . a powerful collection, carefully curated and plunging unexpected depths.” —New Frame

“Each contributor embraces day-to-day life in Ethiopia, and fills each story with a rich sense of time, place, and character. The authors also reveal much about a culture unfamiliar to many American readers.” —Publishers Weekly

(Group read suggestion from Beth McCrea, book club co-founder.)

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The God Who Begat a Jackal

The 17th-century feudal system, vassal uprisings, African folklore, and the Crusades are intertwined with the love between Aster, the daughter of a feudal lord, and Gudu, the court jester and family slave. Aster and Gudu's relationship is the ultimate taboo, but supernatural elements presage a destiny more powerful than the rule of man. With Mezlekia's enchanting storytelling and ironic humor, readers glimpse African deities that have long since weathered away and the social cleavages that have endured through time.

“Mezlekia takes the elements of the simplest of fairy stories—forbidden love, an heiress and a storytelling slave—and embroiders them lushly . . . The imagined world ends up. . . fabulous in the most literal of senses.” —The NY Times

“The God Who Begat a Jackal is everything a novel should be. It delivers an entire world—a profound, comical, moving, and memorable one. The moral and social truths of this novel—subtly and brilliantly evoked—are reminiscent of the novels of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Mezlekia is a writer with extraordinary vision.” —M. Cezair-Thompson

(Group read suggestion from Mia DeGiovine Chaveco, book club co-founder.)

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King of Kings

He was the scion of a dynasty that was reputed to descend from King Solomon, a pioneer of African unity and independence, a staunch confederate of the Allies in their fight against the fascist Axis powers and the messiah of the Jamaican Rastafarian movement. He was a reformer and an autocrat, whose rule was brought to a brutal and ignominious end when he was toppled and murdered by communist rebels. The impressive, dazzling and complex personality of Haile Selassie, King of Kings, is brilliantly conveyed in this biographical portrait by Asfa-Wossen Asserate, his great-nephew.

The author spent his childhood and youth in Ethiopia, though he never held political office in his native country, where his father was the last president of the Imperial Crown Council. The background of the author, who knew Haile Selassie in person, afforded him intimate insights into life at the imperial court and the increasingly controversial policies pursued by the emperor. Asserate’s own experiences, augmented by intensive research in both family and public archives, combine to produce a uniquely detailed portrayal of the last King of Kings, and the turbulent and tragic history of the country over which he reigned supreme for much of the 20th century.

“Haile Selassie is one of the most bizarre and misunderstood figures in 20th-century history, alternately worshipped and mocked, idolised and marginalised. This magnificent biography is diligently researched and fair-minded; he is at last accorded a proper dignity.” —Guardian

“This is a superb, magnificent and totally gripping biography.” —Simon Sebag Montefiore

(A special thank you to book club member, Eydis West for the suggestion.)

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Notes from the Hyena's Belly

Part autobiography and part social history, Notes from the Hyena's Belly offers an unforgettable portrait of Ethiopia, and of Africa, during the 1970s and '80s, an era of civil war, widespread famine, and mass execution. “We children lived like the donkey,” Mezlekia remembers, “careful not to wander off the beaten trail and end up in the hyena's belly.”

His memoir sheds light not only on the violence and disorder that beset his native country, but on the rich spiritual and cultural life of Ethiopia itself. Throughout, he portrays the careful divisions in dress, language, and culture between the Muslims and Christians of the Ethiopian landscape. Mezlekia also explores the struggle between western European interests and communist influences that caused the collapse of Ethiopia's social and political structure—and that forced him, at age 18, to join a guerrilla army.

Through droughts, floods, imprisonment, and killing sprees at the hands of military juntas, Mezlekia survived, eventually emigrating to Canada. In Notes from the Hyena's Belly he bears witness to a time and place that few Westerners have understood.

“Mezlekia has a born storyteller's knack for pacing, and in his musical voice he manages to convey the helter-skelter of his existence . . . A story of high drama told with aplomb.” —Kirkus Reviews

“By skillfully interweaving personal history, politics, and Amhara fables . . . [Mezlekia] has produced the most riveting book about Ethiopia since Kapuscinski's literary allegory The Emperor and the most distinguished African literary memoir since Soyinka's Ake appeared 20 years ago.” —The NY Times Book Review

(Group read suggestion from Mia DeGiovine Chaveco, book club co-founder.)

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The Wife’s Tale

In this indelible memoir that recalls the life of her remarkable 95-year old grandmother, Guardian journalist Aida Edemariam tells the story of modern Ethiopia—a nation that would undergo a tumultuous transformation from feudalism to monarchy to Marxist revolution to democracy, over the course of a single century.

Born in 1916, Yetemegnu was married and had given birth before she turned 15. As the daughter of a socially prominent man, she offered her husband, a poor yet gifted student, the opportunity to become an important religious leader.

She would endure extraordinary trials: deaths of some of her children; her husband’s imprisonment; and her son’s detention. She witnessed the Fascist invasion and the resistance, suffered Allied bombardment and exile; lived through a bloody revolution and the nationalization of her land. She gained audiences with the Emperor to argue for justice for her husband, for revenge, and for her children’s security, and fought court battles to defend her assets against powerful men.

Told in Yetemegnu’s enthralling voice and filled with a vivid cast of characters—emperors and empresses, priests and archbishops, scholars and slaves, Marxist revolutionaries and wartime double agents—The Wife’s Tale introduces a woman both imperious and vulnerable; a mother, widow, and businesswoman whose faith and numerous travails never quashed her love of laughter, mischief and dancing; a fighter whose life was shaped by contact with the volatile events that transformed her nation.

An intimate memoir that offers a panoramic view of Ethiopia’s recent history, The Wife’s Tale takes us deep into the landscape, rituals, social classes, and culture of this ancient, often mischaracterized, richly complex, and unforgettable land—and into the heart of one indomitable woman.

“An ambitious, elegantly descriptive… profoundly lyrical narrative…Edemariam’s book offers a glimpse into a singularly fascinating culture and history as it celebrates the courage, resilience, and grace of an extraordinary woman.” —Kirkus Reviews

(Group read suggestion from Beth McCrea, book club co-founder.)

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