El rey en la sombra

In this monumental novel, Maaza Mengiste investigates the almost erased lives of the women of her native Ethiopia who participated in the war of resistance against the fascist Italian invasion that began in 1935. Through the characters of The King in the Shadow -complex and full of edges, with its lights and shadows- Mengiste reveals to us the serious consequences of an omnipresent violence that leaves deep scars, such as the one that decorates the neck of Hirut, the protagonist of this novel, or the orphanhood of the Jew Ettore upon learning that their parents have been transferred to a concentration camp. The Mussolini regime, complicit in the Nazi extermination plan, has no qualms about exercising similar violence against Ethiopians in the occupation war. But there are also other types of violence that fall on the women protagonists of this story, victims of a patriarchal society in which girls are subjected to forced marriages, sexual violence within marriage is normalized and servitude and servitude are accepted without any kind. questioning.