Beneath the Lion’s Gaze: A Novel by Maaza Mengiste
I’ll admit it, about fifty pages in I was very tempted to put this book down and not look back. It took a while for me to get used to the strange names the strange setting and figure out just what was supposed to be going on – but then things began to knit themselves together and I found myself thrust into the world of Addis Ababa in the 1970′s.. a world where Mao was being read and young girls were being tortured (and not just the young girls).
We follow the story of a father and his two sons. The father is a doctor with a dying wife and struggling with dealing with his two sons – one a conservative father himself the other a brash rebel.
I found myself learning, again, about a country I knew very little about. I knew of the hungering people in Ethiopia but little of how it got to that point to begin with. Although this story is fiction it’s roots are in truth and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in learning more about this country.
