Description
Book SynopsisWhat marks life in Addis Ababa are the starkly different realities coexisting in one place. It’s a growing city taking shape beneath the fraught weight of history, myth, and memory. It is a heady mix. It can also be disorienting, and it is in this space that the stories of Addis Ababa Noir reside . . . These are not gentle stories. They cross into forbidden territories and traverse the damaged terrain of the human heart. The characters in these pages are complicated, worthy of our judgment as much as they somehow manage to elude it. The writers have each discovered their own ways to get us to lean in while forcing us to grit our teeth as we draw closer . . . Despite the varied and distinct voices in these pages, no single book can contain all of the wonderful, intriguing, vexing complexities of Addis Ababa. But what you will read are stories by some of Ethiopia’s most talented writers living in the country and abroad. Each of them considers the many ways that myth and truth and a country’s dark edges come together to create something wholly original—and unsettling.
Trade ReviewWhat I found when I wanted to read the next short story in this anthology, was that I had to take a rest. The stories in Addis Ababa Noir are that powerful. The finished story was good. Ergo, I wanted to read the next one.
Not all the stories involve crime, but the anthology contains many gems and all hold a mirror to life and death in a country riven by civil warfare, notably one by Mengiste herself where experts from Argentina are called in to identify bodies of ‘disappeared’ Ethiopians. On the lighter side there is a wonderful piece of social observation in Bewketu Seyoum’s Under the Minibus Ceiling which follows the random thoughts and conversations of passengers on a bus, which range from the price of berbere (a blend of hot spices integral to Ethiopian cooking), how to confuse the Prophet Isiah with the President of Eritrea and who, exactly, is Angelina Jolie?
Table of Contents11 Introduction
PART I: PAST HAUNTINGS
17 Kind Stranger
29 A Double-Edged Inheritance
47 Ostrich
66 Dust, Ash, Flight
PART II: TRANSLATIONS OF GRIEF
91 Father Bread
105 The Blue Shadow
120 A Night in Bela Sefer
PART III: MADNESS DESCENDS
137 Insomnia
153 Of the Poet and the Café
174 Under the Minibus Ceiling
183 Of Buns and Howls
PART IV: POLICE AND THIEVES
207 Kebele ID
220 None of Your Business
228 Agony of the Congested Heart
244 About the Contributors
