The Shadow King
SynopsisPlot
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 into a flinty cruelty when she resists his advances, and Hirut finds herself tumbling into a new world of thefts and violations, of betrayals and overwhelming rage. Meanwhile, Mussolini’s technologically advanced army prepares for an easy victory. Hundreds of thousands of Italians―Jewish photographer Ettore among them―march on Ethiopia seeking adventure.
Story
About this book
In 1935, Mussolini's forces moved toward Ethiopia in what would become one of the opening conflicts of the wider war that followed. Maaza Mengiste's novel begins in this period, following Hirut, a recently orphaned young woman working as a maid in the household of Kidane, an officer in Emperor Haile Selassie's army. As Kidane prepares his men against the coming invasion, his treatment of Hirut turns cruel when she resists his advances. She is drawn into a situation defined by violation, theft, and fury.
The story extends beyond one household. Italy's technologically superior forces expect a swift campaign, and among the hundreds of thousands of soldiers marching into Ethiopia is Ettore, a Jewish Italian photographer whose own position within the fascist military carries its own contradictions. The novel gives particular attention to women who took part in the resistance against the Italian occupation, figures largely absent from conventional accounts of the conflict.
Mengiste sets the personal against the political throughout. Hirut's struggle within Kidane's home runs parallel to Ethiopia's fight against a foreign army, and the question of who gets recorded in history, and who does not, sits at the center of the book's concerns.
