The Wife’s Tale by Aida Edemariam review – anatomy of an unyielding spirit

The extraordinary life of the author’s grandmother, who married aged eight and survived tumultuous events, is richly and painstakingly evoked

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. And in choosing to excavate and write a family history, she follows a growing trend among biographers reshaping the genre with intimate studies of late mothers, complicated fathers and tragic siblings, from Helen Macdonald and Richard Beard to 2017’s Costa prize-winning biographer, Rebecca Stott.

In Edemariam’s case, it is the life of Yetemegnu, who was born in the northern Ethiopian city of Gondar and died five years ago at the grand age of 97 (or thereabouts: the timeline in the book explains that formal birth certificates weren’t used in Ethiopia in the early 20th century). She emerges as a bewitching and resilient figure whose life-changing moments sometimes intersect with the tumultuous history of her nation. Edemariam’s narrative often expands to cover the bigger picture – Italian occupation in the 1930s, resistance, liberation, political coups, revolts and famine – before contracting back to Yetemegnu’s life.

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