The Wife's Tale is a biography of the author's grandmother Yetemegnu, who was born around 1916 in Gondar, Ethiopia, was married at age eight to a high-ranking clergyman, and lived for nearly a century, through huge political upheavals and social change.

The account of Yetemegnu's childhood has some of the the most vivid material and feels loosely fictionalised, unsurprisingly given it must have been reconstructed from memories over half a century later. As a wife and mother, what comes through is the intensity of her concerns for her children, not all of whom survived childhood. Her husband dies less than half way through A Wife's Tale, in 1953, after falling out of favour, but Yetemegnu then spent decades struggling to recover his property — a personal fight, but one which reveals something of the networks of patronage and power in imperial Ethiopia. And then everything is upended by the 1974 Revolution, and by some of her children studying and moving overseas.

Edemariam only occasionally lapses into providing background information, for example about the Italian and then British occupations during the Second World War. Otherwise the perspective stays with Yetemegnu, and the strength of The Wife's Tale is that she is someone with whom we can identify, but through whose personal history we experience a world that now seems in many ways quite strange.

March 2025

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