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The Shadow King: SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2020
Maaza Mengiste
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Description for The Shadow King: SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2020
Paperback.
SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2020
A BOOK OF THE YEAR IN THE NEW YORK TIMES, GUARDIAN, ELLE, TIME, SPECTATOR
'DEVASTATING' Marlon James, 'BRILLIANT' Salman Rushdie, 'MAGNIFICENT' Aminatta Forna, 'WONDERFUL' Laila Lalami, 'UNFORGETTABLE' The Times, 'REMARKABLE' New York Times
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 ... Read morebury 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.
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Product Details
Publisher
Canongate Books
Place of Publication
Edinburgh, United Kingdom
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 2 to 4 working days
About Maaza Mengiste
Maaza Mengiste was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. A Fulbright Scholar and professor in the MFA in Creative Writing & Literary Translation programme at Queens College, she is the author of The Shadow King, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the HWA Gold Crown, and Beneath the Lion's Gaze, named one of the Guardian's Ten Best Contemporary African ... Read moreBooks. Her work can be found in the New Yorker, Granta and the New York Times, among other publications. She lives in New York City. @MaazaMengiste | maazamengiste.com Show Less
Reviews for The Shadow King: SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2020
A beautifully crafted account of the female soldiers resisting Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 and their own oppression in Ethiopian society. Lyrical, furious and meticulously researched, it is a necessary act of historical reclamation
Guardian, Best Books of the Year
The Shadow King is a beautiful and devastating work; of women holding together ... Read morea world ripping itself apart. They will slip into your dreams and overtake your memories
MARLON JAMES Unforgettable. I suspect I won't read anything more moving this year
The Times, Book of the Month
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
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 Set during Italy's 1935 invasion of Ethiopia, this absorbing novel spotlights the African women who went to war . . . [Mengiste's] achievement in The Shadow King is to bring to life those women, and to depict them as dynamic entities, their capabilities, limitations and beliefs evolving under duress in as fully complex a way as those of their male counterparts
Guardian, Book of the Day
A brilliant novel, lyrically lifting history towards myth. It's also compulsively readable. I devoured it in two days
SALMAN RUSHDIE A must-read . . . The Shadow King is a masterpiece . . . Brilliant . . . [Mengiste] is simply an outstanding writer, with an uncanny ability with words, metaphor, history and truth . . . I simply cannot recommend this remarkable book highly enough to anyone who looks for the best writing to tell compelling stories
Washington Post
A gripping story . . . Intelligently structured, beautifully written . . . So compelling
KAMILA SHAMSIE Urgent and propulsive but also lyrical and meditative . . . An inspiring, harrowing portrait of an overlooked aspect of an overlooked conflict
Metro
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