In “The Shadow King,” Queens College’s Maaza Mengiste digs into the history of her native Ethiopia and unearths a true-to-life story of women who fought for the right to defend their country against Mussolini’s army in the years before World War II. Nearly a decade in the making, Mengiste’s second novel is a mythic tale inspired by the stories she heard growing up–and the discoveries she made doing meticulous research in Italy and Ethiopia.

From The New York Times: “In war stories both old and new, women are nurses to the wounded, and the victims of rape — war’s unbanishable shadow. Rarely are they depicted as warriors. Is that a profound truth or a blind spot? Maaza Mengiste’s lyrical, remarkable new novel, “The Shadow King,” set during the Second Italo-Ethiopian War, somehow manages to solve the riddle . . .[A]ll this grandeur, all this grace, is in the service of a tale of a woman, Hirut, as indelible and compelling a hero as any I’ve read in years. This novel made me feel pity and fear, and more times than is reasonable, gave me goose bumps.”  

 

Read the New York Times review 

* Learn more about Maaze Mengiste and see a list of her upcoming talks