Born sometime in the 1920s, Yètèmegnu has lived her life with forbearance but also with courage, creativity and love; she nourishes many people with her own hands, including the infant of a destitute family left with her during the famine of 1984.

But with a vividly cinematic narrative, the author takes us through Yetemegnu’s recurring trance as if she felt and sensed the zar through her own imagination of Ethiopian myths and ancestral spirits.Edemariam, a Guardian journalist, says in her acknowledgments that she spent years reading Ethiopian history “before I could begin to understand the world in which she [Yetemegnu] grew up”. By situating her grandmother as a central agent, Aida Edemariam tells a story that transcends the authority of the official archive, and its assumption to singular and credible knowledge. She alludes to a couple of trips back (she now lives in Oxford), but we learn nothing of her possible deracination or her emotional relationship with Ethiopia now. The physical world around her too – the look and feel of things, the age-old customs, the seasons around which the book is structured – is invoked with a richness that feels tangible, sensuous: “The dry season wore on… Wild figs darkened in the trees. And then there is the absorbing story of the Italian occupation when Yetemegnu takes us to the war and to the prominent personalities of the time such as Ras Kassa, to his son and to his brothers who were executed by Italian fascists, and to Abune Tewoflos who later became the second Patriarch of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, and who was Yetemegnu’s family friend.

If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial.Yètèmegnu’s husband, Tsèga, is the central force in her life but he is shadowy, at times brutal, at other times tender, a talented but low-status man trying to climb the ecclesiastical pole. This claustrophobic world is soon punctured by the Italian invasion of Abyssinia and the exile of Emperor Haile Selassie to Britain. Being a native of Gojjam “where everyone knew the evil eye flourished,” complicated Tsega’s relationship to the people of Gondar and significantly so after he became Aleqa. In other words, Aida locates the past in such a way that seems to converge with her own memory and identity. In this elegant account, Aida Edemariam has sketched her grandmother’s life in an Ethiopia that shifted, within 50 years, from feudal monarchy to Marxist dictatorship.

It is through this brief account of Aleqa Tsega’s life that the subject of the book, Yetemegnu, evolves.So the book is always about Yetemegnu and the capacity for an “ordinary” woman like her to be bold, brave and unconventional within the constraints of her time and place. And yet as Yetemegnu expressed the frequent violence that her often kind and loving husband precariously inflicts she also conveyed her aspirations and her rebellious stance that she continually conceived. The craggy highlands appear as real as any human character; even Ethiopia’s ubiquitous mules are described with real sympathy. The church of Ba’aata Mariam, which once turned Emperor Tewodros II’s mother away when she brought her son to be baptized because she sold kosso (purgative) to survive, and could not “afford the two jars of dark beer, two bowls of stew and forty injera they demanded in payment,” became Aida’s major source of inquiry. Aida Edemariam found the subject of this engaging biography in her own family tree – The Wife’s Tale being the story of her paternal grandmother.