The Shadow King
by Maaza Mengiste
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Pub Date 30 Jan 2020 | Archive Date 5 Dec 2019
Canongate Books | Canongate
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Description
'Beautiful and devastating' Marlon James
ETHIOPIA. 1935.
With the threat of Mussolini’s army looming, recently orphaned Hirut struggles to adapt to her new life as a maid. Her new employer, Kidane, an officer in Emperor Haile Selassie’s army, rushes to mobilise his strongest men before the Italians invade.
Hirut and the other women long to do more than care for the wounded and bury the dead. When Emperor Haile Selassie goes into exile and Ethiopia quickly loses hope, it is Hirut who offers a plan to maintain morale. She helps disguise a gentle peasant as the emperor and soon becomes his guard, inspiring other women to take up arms. But how could she have predicted her own personal war, still to come, as a prisoner of one of Italy’s most vicious officers?
The Shadow King is a gorgeously crafted and unputdownable exploration of female power, and what it means to be a woman at war.
Advance Praise
'The Shadow King is a beautiful and devastating work; of women holding together a world ripping itself apart. They will slip into your dreams and overtake your memories'
MARLON JAMES
'With epic sweep and dignity, Mengiste has lifted this struggle into legend, along with the women who fought in it. Beautiful, horrifying, elegant and haunted, The Shadow King is a modern classic'
ANDREW SEAN GREER, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of LESS
'A brilliant novel, lyrically lifting history towards myth. It’s also compulsively readable. I devoured it in two days'
SALMAN RUSHDIE
'Lyrical, remarkable . . . Breathtakingly skillful . . . The reader feels . . . In the steady hands of a master . . . Hirut [is] as indelible and compelling a hero as any I've read in years'
New York Times Book Review
'The Shadow King is incredible. I’ve read nothing like it before. There is war, love, betrayal, history and the present day wrapped in the hearts and minds of complex characters. Maaza Mengiste rises as Toni Morrison rests. The baton has been passed and taken deftly'
LEMN SISSAY
'One of the most affecting accounts of the terror of war I have ever read, all the more so for the being cloaked in the language of beauty, such that the words and their meaning burn through the senses. The Shadow King is a work born of rage, a rage made magnificent for its compassion and the story it tells us – that in war there are no winners'
AMINATTA FORNA, author of HAPPINESS
'A sprawling, unforgettable epic from an immensely talented author who's unafraid to take risks... [R]endered all the more effective by Mengiste's gift at creating memorable characters . . . The star of the novel, however, is Mengiste's gorgeous writing, which makes The Shadow King nearly impossible to put down... [O]ne of the most beautiful novels of the year'
Michael Schaub, NPR
'The Shadow King is not a story about helpless victims of colonial conquest. Against the odds, it is written in a key of pride and exaltation, and its characters have the outsize form of national heroes . . . Mengiste ambitiously stretches her canvas to include colliding perspectives . . . Stirring'
Wall Street Journal
'The Shadow King is a novel about war and history, both epic in scope and intimate in detail. As its characters fight in Ethiopia’s struggle for independence from fascist Italy, they must confront experiences in their private pasts if they have any hope of preserving their collective memory. Maaza Mengiste has a gift for rendering everyone in this story, resister and invader alike, with great nuance and complexity, leaving us with no room for easy judgment. A wonderful book'
LAILA LALAMI, author of THE MOOR'S ACCOUNT
'Maaza Mengiste has given us a powerful tale of a woman warrior – not some mythical superhero, but a girl who holds on to the memory of her parents and her father’s gun and longs to do battle to avenge their loss. Reminiscent of Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior and Marlon James’s The Book of Night Women, this is a compelling story of female empowerment and an epic one at that'
MARY MORRIS, author of GATEWAY TO THE MOON
'Mengiste again brings heart and authenticity to a slice of Ethiopian history . . . [She] breaks new ground in this evocative, mesmerising account of the role of women during wartime – not just as caregivers, but as warriors defending their country'
Publishers Weekly (starred review)
'Mengiste is a master of characterisation . . . A memorable portrait of a people at war – a war that has long demanded recounting from an Ethiopian point of view'
Kirkus Reviews
'Monumental . . . Mengiste's extraordinary characters epitomise the impossibly intricate ties between humanity and monstrosity, and the unthinkable, immeasurable cost of survival'
Booklist (starred review)
Available Editions
| EDITION | Hardcover |
| ISBN | 9781838851163 |
| PRICE | £16.99 (GBP) |
Featured Reviews
lizzie p, Librarian
wow - what a fascinating and utterly important story. we don't often get to read these stories; stories of war and colonisation from Italy. when we read about Mussolini's italy, its often in relation to the war, but never of its colonisation of Ethiophia. An absolutely important novel I recommend.
Paromjit H, Reviewer
Maaza Mengiste's blend of poetic and lyrical historical fiction and fact that focuses on little known aspects of the beginnings of WW2 is an extraordinary literary accomplishment but nevertheless proved to be a challenge to read. It has echoes of Shakespearean plays and elements of classic Greek plays with its use of a collective chorus speaking for all with one voice, but the deployment of a lack of puntuation in parts of the storytelling made reading this difficult until I became accustomed to it. Mengiste writes a hauntingly heartbreaking and moving original story of Italy's ambitious Mussolini wanting to sweep away the historic shame of previous defeat by Ethiopia, by seeking vengeance with a 1935 invasion of the country under Emperor Haile Selassie. It's a brutal, violent, and cruel endeavour, with Italy expecting a straight forward victory with their vastly superior technology.
Depicted within the narrative is Selassie's despair as he prepares for exile, photos with their snapshot description of what occurs and the connections that exist and grow between a orphan, the brave and courageous Hirut, who ends up working as a maid to a military commander, Dejazmach Kidane and his wife, Aster and an Italian Jewish photographer, Ettore Navarro, in the Italian army, a patriot who believes in the war, only to find himself forced to question the war and himself as the never ending terrors and horrors unfold. For good reason, Hirat is a resentful and unhappy woman, but both she and Aster refuse to accept their role of burying the dead and providing aid to those wounded. Inspired by Hirat, the shadow king is created to raise Ethiopian spirits and fighting efforts. As women become Ethiopia's warriors, Hirat becomes a prisoner of war under the cruel and horrifying Italian soldiers, to end up years later reflecting on this period of her life through the medium of photographs.
Mengiste is a truly gifted novelist, her multilayered writing is on a epic scale, capturing a wide and disparate set of perspectives on the tragedy of war, its repercussions, and its critical role in shifting and changing people. Her unique spotlight on women, all that they are, what they endure, the abuse and rape, and above all their resilience and remarkable strength in the war provides the backbone to this superb book. None of the subtly nuanced characters are black and white caricatures, where unexpected kindnesses can be found in the most unusual quarters. The author looks at both sides in the conflict, giving us an eye opening look at this period of WW2 history in Ethiopia and Italy's effort to enforce colonial rule. This is not going to be a book for everyone, but it will be for many readers who are looking for something different and for those interested in this period of history. Highly recommended. Many thanks to Canongate for an ARC.
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