The Shadow King
Maaza Mengiste's The Shadow King, published in 2019 and shortlisted for the Booker Prize, is a fierce, lyrical novel about the women who fought and were largely written out of the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935. Hirut is an orphaned servant in the household of Aster and her husband Kidane, a high-ranking officer mobilizing his men to resist Mussolini's army. As the war presses in, Aster, long dismissed and abused, begins to lead the women of the village in their own armed defense, and Hirut conceives the scheme that gives the book its title: dressing a humble peasant as a double for the exiled emperor Haile Selassie, then parading him through the hills as a living symbol that gives the resistance back its courage. Mengiste interweaves Hirut's story with the gaze of Ettore Navarra, an Italian-Jewish photographer whose orders are to document the brutality the regime hopes will cow the country, and with chorus-like passages that summon the women of the war as a collective voice. The result is a novel about memory, witness, and the cost of being unseen. Reaching back into Mengiste's own family history, The Shadow King restores to the record the soldiers, mothers, and queens whose names history left out.
Where The Shadow King keeps showing up
Two of our editors' lists feature this novel.
What you might want to know about The Shadow King
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
It is 1935 and Mussolini's Italy has invaded Ethiopia. In a noble household near the front, orphan servant Hirut has just been given her dead father's old rifle when her mistress Aster decides to fight beside the men. Hirut helps disguise a peasant named Minim as a double for Emperor Haile Selassie.
The Shadow King was written by Maaza Mengiste and published in 2019. Mengiste is an Ethiopian-American writer; the novel was shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize.
Yes. The Shadow King is fictional but built around Italy's 1935 invasion of Ethiopia and the documented role of women fighters in the Ethiopian resistance. Maaza Mengiste researched the period extensively.
The Shadow King is 448 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Shadow King takes most readers 7 to 10 hours to finish.
The Shadow King is a standalone novel by an unknown author, not part of a series.
The Shadow King is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
