The Anglo-Ethiopian Society
Book Club - The Wife's Tale
Aida Edemariam
Tuesday 18th September 2018
7:30pm, National Theatre, Upper Ground, South Bank, London SE1 9PX - all welcome
The Society's book club will discuss The Wife's Tale by Aida Edemariam who is a senior feature writer and editor for the Guardian. The Wife's Tale is an intimate memoir, both of a life and of a country.
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 witnessed Fascist invasion and occupation, Allied bombardment and 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.
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, of her husband’s imprisonment, of her fight for justice – all of it played out against an ancient cycle of festivals and the rhythms of the seasons. She introduces us to a rich cast of characters – emperors and empresses, scholars and nuns, Marxist revolutionaries and wartime double agents. And through these encounters she takes us deep into the landscape and culture of this many-layered, often mischaracterised country – and the heart of one indomitable woman.
The Wife's Tale is published in hardback as well as in Kindle and Audio formats.
We will meet in The Long Bar on the ground floor of the National Theatre.
If you would like to attend, or want further information, please email the Book Club.
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The Wife's Tale by Aida Edermariam. Publisher: London, 4th Estate, 2018 Hardcover: ISBN:9780007459605 Price: £16.99 |