The Shadow King
Maaza Mengiste
The women who fought Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia, written back into history.
Mengiste recovers the overlooked role of Ethiopian women in the resistance to Italy's 1935 invasion, centering a servant, Hirut, who takes up arms and helps stage a peasant as a decoy emperor. Drawing on her own great-grandmother's enlistment, Mengiste writes war, gender and photography into a single frame. The novel was shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize.
Its legacy. It reflects her wider work gathering photographs and testimony from the Italo-Ethiopian war.
- Author
- Maaza Mengiste
- First published
- 2019
- Genre
- Novel
- Theme
- Contemporary Voices, Memoir and Testimony
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