International Authors Book Club

Read an author of your choosing from a predetermined country. June’s nation is Ethiopia. We will meet on Friday, June 20 (special date due to holiday closure) to discuss your author, their works, and any themes they explore.

To get you started, check out our list of a few literary award-winning authors. The titles, a combination of fiction and memoirs, are available through your Santa Fe Public Library as books or (if noted) ebooks (Hoopla or Overdrive/Libby).

For disability accommodations, please contact a Programs Manager for SFPL at 505-955-6786 or 505-955-2817.

Suggested authors:

Netway Anafu, author of The Foreigners (ebook)

The Foreigners is historical/generational fiction that questions culture, religion, education, relationship, family and origin and the impact of politics on people's lives.

Aida Edemariam, author of The Wife’s Tale (ebook)

The memoir of a woman who lived through events that shaped modern Ethiopian history.

Rebecca G. Haile, author of Held at a Distance: My Rediscovery of Ethiopia (ebook)

Haile wrote this memoir about her return to Ethiopia after her family's forced exile following the 1974 revolution and 25 years in the United States.

Djamila Ibrahim, author of Things Are Good Now (eaudiobook)

Set in East Africa, the Middle East, Canada, and the U.S., Things Are Good Now examines the weight of the migrant experience on the psyche. In these pages, women, men, and children who've crossed continents in search of a better life find themselves struggling with displacement and the religious and cultural clashes they face in their new homes.

Dinaw Mengestu, author of All Our Names, The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears, How to Read the Air, and Someone Like Us

Mengestu's debut novel, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, tells the story of Sepha Stephanos, who fled the Ethiopian Revolution 17 years prior and now owns and runs a failing grocery store in a poor African-American section of Washington, D.C.

All Our Names is the story of two young men who come of age during an African revolution, As the line between idealism and violence becomes blurred, the friends are driven apart -- one into the deepest peril, and the other into the safety of the American Midwest.

In How to Read the Air, Jonas Woldemariam leaves behind his marriage and job in New York to retrace his mother and father's honeymoon as young immigrants. He weaves together a history that will take him from his parents' youth to his life in America today.

Someone Like Us is about a journalist traveling across the US to unravel the secrets surrounding the life and death of his Ethiopian immigrant father.

Maaza Mengiste, author of Beneath the Lion’s Gaze and The Shadow King

Beneath the Lion’s Gaze is an epic tale of a father and two sons, of betrayals and loyalties, of a family unraveling in the wake of Ethiopia's 1974 socialist revolution.

The Shadow King is set during the early part of Emperor Haile Selassie’s reign (1930-74) with the threat of Mussolini's army looming. As the war begins, the Emperor goes into exile and Ethiopia quickly loses hope. Hirut disguises a peasant as the emperor and becomes his guard, inspiring other women to take up arms against the Italians.

Nega Mezlekia, author of Notes from the Hyena’s Belly and The God Who Begat a Jackal (both ebooks)

In this memoir, Mezlekia recalls his boyhood in Ethiopia, and his journey to manhood during the 1970s and 1980s. He traces his evolution from child to soldier--forced at 18 to join a guerrilla army. And he describes the hardships under the communist junta.

Mezlekia’s first novel is steeped in African folklore and teeming with the class, ethnic and religious struggles of pre-colonial Africa. In The God Who Begat a Jackal, the 17th-century feudal system, vassal uprisings, religious mythology, and the Crusades are intertwined with the love between Aster, the daughter of a lord, and Gudu, the court jester and family slave.

Mahtem Shiferraw, author of Nomenclatures of Invisibility (ebook)

Through a lens simultaneously historical and political, Shiferraw attends to personal and collective experiences of migration, motherhood, and immigrants’ complicated notions of home. Part of the American Poets Continuum series.

Mihret Sibhat, author of The History of a Difficult Child

A tragicomic family saga set in a small Ethiopian town following the 1974 revolution, told from the perspective of the youngest daughter of a large, formerly land-owning family, who contends with bullies, poverty, and a dictatorship with humor and a refusal to be silenced.

Mesfin Tadesse, author of Lucy's People: An Ethiopian Memoir (ebook)

Tadesse recounts a life inextricably entwined with the modern history of Ethiopia, from his idyllic childhood as the son of one of the country's military elite through his conscription into the communist-controlled military to the point at which he departs the country as a refugee. Along the way he completes his education in Egypt, becomes a respected hydraulic engineer, and is sent to a brutal prison for his political connections and views.

Various Authors, ID Identity: New Short Fiction from Africa (ebook)

Contains 21 short stories with two Ethiopian entries: The Piano Player by Agazit Abate and When the War Came Home by Heran Abate.

Abraham Verghese, author of Cutting for Stone and The Covenant of Water

In Cutting for Stone, Marion and Shiva Stone are twin brothers born of a secret union between beautiful Indian nun and a brash British surgeon. Orphaned by their mother's death and their father's disappearance, bound together by a preternatural connection and a shared fascination with medicine, the twins come of age as Ethiopia’s revolution begins.

Spanning 1900-77, The Covenant of Water is set in Kerala, on South India's Malabar Coast, and follows three generations of a family that suffers a peculiar affliction: in every generation, at least one person dies by drowning -- and in Kerala, water is everywhere. At the turn of the century, a 12-year-old girl, grieving the death of her father, is sent by boat to her wedding, where she will meet her 40-year-old husband for the first time. From this new beginning, the young girl -- and future matriarch, known as Big Ammachi -- will witness unthinkable changes over the span of her extraordinary life, full of joy and triumph as well as hardship and loss, her faith and love the only constants.

Agitu Wodajo, author of A Purposeful Life (ebook)

A Purposeful Life is a memoir detailing the author's life and extraordinary accomplishments from her upbringing in Ethiopia during the 60s to her immigration to the United States along with her children, her commitment to the empowerment of women in both Ethiopia and the United States and traveling the world.