"The story of war has always been a masculine story, but this was not true for Ethiopia and it has never been that way in any form of struggle."

The first novel by Maaza Mengiste took readers back to the 1970s and the revolution in Ethiopia. Her latest, The Shadow King, heads further into that country's history: to the Italian invasion in 1935.

Mengiste talks about the role of women in war, and why her great-grandmother sued for custody of her father's gun.