"A brilliant novel, lyrically lifting history towards myth. It's also compulsively readable. I devoured it in two days." -- Salman Rushdie. With the threat of Mussolini's army looming, recently orphaned Hirut struggles to adapt to her new life as a maid in Kidane and his wife Aster's household. Kidane, an officer in Emperor Haile Selassie's army, rushes to mobilize his strongest men before the Italians invade. His initial kindness to Hirut shifts...

"This memorable, heartbreaking story opens in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 1974, on the eve of a revolution. Yonas kneels in his mother’s prayer room, pleading to his god for an end to the violence that has wracked his family and country. His father, Hailu, a prominent doctor, has been ordered to report to jail after helping a victim of state-sanctioned torture to die. And Dawit, Hailu’s youngest son, has joined an underground resistance movement—a...

"Wisecracking, inquisitive, and bombastic, Selam Asmelash is the youngest child in her large, boisterous family. Even before she is born, she has a wry, bewitching omniscience that animates life in her Small Town in southwestern Ethiopia in the 1980s. Selam and her father listen to the radio in secret as the socialist military junta that recently overthrew the government seizes properties and wages civil war in the North. The Asmelashes, once an enterprising,...

Addis Ababa is a sprawling melting pot of cultures where rich and poor live side by side in relative harmony—until they don't.

Maaza Mengiste's story "Dust, Ash, Flight" has won the 2021 Edgar Award for Best Short Story, presented by the Mystery Writers of America

"Several of the 14 stories here, most of them striking and accomplished, involve post-revolution loss, guilt and revenge. Some

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Marion and Shiva Stone are twin brothers born of a secret union between an Indian nun and a British surgeon at a mission hospital in Addis Ababa. Orphaned by their mother's death in childbirth and their father's disappearance, they are bound together by a preternatural connection and a shared fascination with medicine. Marion flees his homeland fresh out of medical school when he and his brother fall in love with the same woman. He goes to work in...

"The story of a young man, Prince Alamayou of Abyssinia (present day Ethiopia), who is taken from his home and the Abyssinian war to the court of Queen Victoria--a world he knows nothing about. With him is Philip Layard, a young apprentice to one of the doctors on the battlefield in Abyssinia, who becomes Alamayou's guardian, only friend, and eventually, the love of his life. When Parliament accuses Alamayou of murder, the young prince is sentenced...