The Wife‘s Tale

A hundred years ago, a girl was born in the northern Ethiopian city of Gondar. Before she was ten years old, Yetemegnu was married to a man two decades her senior, an ambitious poet-priest. Over the next century, her world changed beyond recognition. She lived through Fascist invasion and occupation, Allied bombardment, exile from her city, the ascent and fall of Emperor Haile Selassie, revolution, and civil war. She endured all these things alongside parenthood, widowhood, and the death of children. The Wife’s Tale is an intimate memoir both of a life and of a country. In prose steeped in Yetemegnu’s distinctive voice and point of view, Aida Edemariam retells her grandmother’s stories of a childhood surrounded by proud priests and soldiers, her coming of age, her husband’s imprisonment, and her fight for justice—all played out against the rhythms of the natural world and the rituals of the Orthodox Church. She introduces us to a rich cast of characters—emperors and empresses, scholars and nuns, Marxist revolutionaries and wartime double agents. Through these encounters she takes us deep into the landscape and culture of this multilayered, often mischaracterized country—and into the heart of one courageous woman.