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    The Wife's Tale: A Personal History
    The Wife's Tale: A Personal History
    The Wife's Tale: A Personal History
    Audiobook9 hours

    The Wife's Tale: A Personal History

    Written by Aida Edemariam

    Narrated by Adjoa Andoh

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    In this indelible memoir that recalls the life of her remarkable ninety-five-year old grandmother, Guardian journalist Aida Edemariam tells the story of modern Ethiopia—a nation that would undergo a tumultuous transformation from feudalism to monarchy to Marxist revolution to democracy, over the course of one century.

    Born in the northern Ethiopian city of Gondar in about 1916, Yetemegnu was married and had given birth before she turned fifteen. As the daughter of a socially prominent man, she also offered her husband, a poor yet gifted student, the opportunity to become an important religious leader.

    Over the next decades Yetemegnu would endure extraordinary trials: the death of some of her children; her husband’s imprisonment; and the detention of one of her sons. She witnessed the Fascist invasion of Ethiopia and the subsequent resistance, suffered Allied bombardment and exile from her city; lived through a bloody revolution and the nationalization of her land. She gained audiences with Emperor Haile Selassie I to argue for justice for her husband, for revenge, and for her children’s security, and fought court battles to defend her assets against powerful men. But sustained, in part, by her fierce belief in the Virgin Mary and in Orthodox Christianity, Yetemegnu survived. She even learned to read, in her sixties, and eventually made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem.

    Told in Yetemegnu’s enthralling voice and filled with a vivid cast of characters—emperors and empresses, priests and scholars, monks and nuns, archbishops and slaves, Marxist revolutionaries and wartime double agents—The Wife’s Tale introduces a woman both imperious and vulnerable; a mother, widow, and businesswoman whose deep faith and numerous travails never quashed her love of laughter, mischief and dancing; a fighter whose life was shaped by direct contact with the volatile events that transformed her nation.

    An intimate memoir that offers a panoramic view of Ethiopia’s recent history, The Wife’s Tale takes us deep into the landscape, rituals, social classes, and culture of this ancient, often mischaracterized, richly complex, and unforgettable land—and into the heart of one indomitable woman.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateMar 20, 2018
    ISBN9780062799029
    Author

    Aida Edemariam

    Aida Edemariam, whose father is Ethiopian and mother Canadian, grew up in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia,. She studied English literature at Oxford University and the University of Toronto, and has worked as a journalist in New York (Harper's Magazine), Toronto, and London, where she is a senior feature writer and editor for The Guardian. Her first book, The Wife's Tale, was named a Finalist for the prestigious Governor General's Award for Nonfiction in Canada. Aida Edemariam lives in Oxford.

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    Reviews for The Wife's Tale

    4/5

    22 ratings4 reviews

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    • 3/5
      This is a book that manages to be interesting without actually being terribly engaging. It is an account of the author's grandmother's life, taken from interviews over 20 years. It seems to wander about in tense and in the person, at times grandmother is "she" at others she is referred to by name. In the final portion of the book, the author appears in the first person and starts describing people by her relationship to them. It makes for a book that is hard to follow in places. The chronology is also hard to follow. The books is divided into a number of years, but things like the interval between the children's births is never really described in detail (until the chronology at the end, by which time it;s to late). And I understand that is how you'd discuss life in memory, but it makes for a story that is curiously un-rooted. Then there are the many religious passages, which seemed to have barely any relationship to the events before or after their insertion. I'm not sure what they were supposed to contribute. Having said that, it is a tale from a completely different time and culture and she lives through an awful lot in her 98 years. Married young to a man in his 30s there are hints of abuse, but it's in passing, as if it were normal. Then there are the impact of national and international events on the rural corner of Ethiopia, the Italian invasion, a couple of revolutions, a famine and through it all she survives. I liked the way she embraced technology like the radio and telephone, with delight. It has a lot to interest the reader, I'm just not sure that the execution presents the material in the most engaging manner.
    • 4/5
      And a half star. Started this book in Gondar on my first visit to Africa. It helped bring a depth to my experiences and because I was there in many of the places she spent her life, brought sights and smells and sounds, plant and trees, animals and birds, food and drink, and people - all new to me and all making reading the memoir of Yetemegnu richer and deeper. I loved the structure and poetry of Aide Edemariam's writing and the description of recent (and some more ancient) history of Ethiopia.
    • 5/5
      "Light rains, spots of fresh green grass. Storks fly north. Women prepare fuel for the rainy season: deadwood, and sundried cow dung coated with mud. Caravans hurry home from Sudan. Fishing in rivers. Children sing of the country’s wellbeing to storks, men and women picnic outside, celebrating the birthday of Mary."This was every bit as marvellous as the reviews and prizes suggest it is. The author tells the story of her grandmother, who was married as a child and by virtue of a long life saw huge change in Ethiopia. She lived under imperial rule, witnessed the Italian invasion, and then British bombs. She lived through the takeover of the Marxist-Leninist influenced Derg, and the terrible famines everyone over a certain age will no doubt picture when someone mentions Ethiopia. This isn't a universal picture: the author doesn't hide the affluence of her grandmother's family. But her privilege meant that she travelled and witnessed more than some, and as a woman her experience across the century is now very much of an almost unrecognisable past, and was of the past even to her children and grandchildren. I loved the way the author structured the book around Ethiopian months, with a description of the season and traditional work.
    • 4/5
      Spanning 100 years, this is a fascinating memoir of the author's grandmother, who was born and raised in the city of Gondar in Ethiopia. Married at 8 to a man (a poet-priest) who was over three times her age, this memoir follows her life through the changing world of the 20th century, witnessing Fascist invasion, revolution, civil war and famine, whilst enduring parenthood, widowhood and the death of children. Edemariam's retelling of her grandmother's stories opens up a new world and culture to the reader.