It is with a deft, subtle touch that Edemariam portrays both the contemporary celebration of the event and the deeper tragedy of it. The Financial Times and its journalism are subject to a self-regulation regime under the FT Editorial Code of Practice. Another exceptional moment is Yetemegnu’s “wayward” experience with the zar, a ritual that can only be captured by one’s own lived experience. Tewoflos was executed by the military regime in 1974 with 60 other officials of the imperial government. With a housewife’s view of history, Yètèmegnu witnesses first-hand the changes – in the food market, the rental market, in education, and in attitudes – that herald the end of Selassie’s rule in 1974.

Attempting to bring the fragments of Yetemegnu’s rich and vast account into one narrative may have been difficult, and results in an occasional disjointed narrative that is sometimes hard to follow. A week ago I knew almost nothing about Ethiopia, except that it is Orthodox Christian and that there was a dreadful famine in the 1980s that my malapropism-prone great-aunt once referred to as “the famine in Utopia”. And through the recurring lines of Mariam, Mariam, the author brilliantly conjures this exhilarating chant that was performed by women during a time when there were no hospitals around.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.

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.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. The growing social mobility from which her husband benefited accelerates to the degree that all of her traditional privileges are torn away and she is forced to live on a small stipend from the Marxist regime. 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.

It is as if Aida wanted to understand her own unfamiliar journey to such experiences and that she also wanted to urgently remind the reader about notions of culture that were once important but are now completely erased from the memory of contemporary knowledge. It is through this brief account of Aleqa Tsega’s life that the subject of the book, Yetemegnu, evolves.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. And so Tsega’s turbulent and at once blissful relationship with Ba’aata begins, which the author dazzlingly portrays. She emerges as a bewitching and resilient figure whose life-changing moments sometimes intersect with the tumultuous history of her nation. The rain on Ruphael’s Day, and its “thud, thud, thud” on the corrugated iron roof reminded me of my own childhood when my mother, just like Nannye, dropped frankincense on “coals huddled into a low clay pot—releasing sweet smoke that rose and tangled with the smell of roasting coffee.