Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Beneath the Lion's Gaze: A Novel
    Beneath the Lion's Gaze: A Novel
    Beneath the Lion's Gaze: A Novel
    Audiobook10 hours

    Beneath the Lion's Gaze: A Novel

    Written by Maaza Mengiste

    Narrated by Steven Crossley

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    This memorable, heartbreaking story opens in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 1974, on the eve of a revolution. Yonas kneels in his mother's prayer room, pleading to his god for an end to the violence that has wracked his family and country. His father, Hailu, a prominent doctor, has been ordered to report to jail after helping a victim of state-sanctioned torture to die. And Dawit, Hailu's youngest son, has joined an underground resistance movement-a choice that will lead to more upheaval and bloodshed across a ravaged Ethiopia.

    Beneath the Lion's Gaze tells a gripping story of family, of the bonds of love and friendship set in a time and place that has rarely been explored in fiction before. It is a story about the lengths human beings will go in pursuit of freedom and the human price of a national revolution. Emotionally gripping, poetic, and indelibly tragic, Beneath the Lion's Gaze is a transcendent and powerful debut.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateJan 25, 2010
    ISBN9781400184941
    Beneath the Lion's Gaze: A Novel

    Related to Beneath the Lion's Gaze

    Related audiobooks

    Sagas For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      'The Reformatory' Tells A Story Of Ghosts, Abuse, Racism — And Sibling Love

      Nov 2, 2023

      Tananarive Due's haunting, unflinching novel delves deep into the realities of the Jim Crow South and the very real horrors that took place at Florida reformatory schools in the 1950s.

      3 min read

    • Article

      Akwaeke Emezi

      May 28, 2021

      Akwaeke Emezi
      6 min read

    • Article

      Femi Kayode

      Feb 4, 2021

      Femi Kayode
      6 min read

    • Article

      Who Is Unthinkable? On Imbolo Mbue’s ‘How Beautiful We Were’

      Mar 26, 2021

      1. Fake news has never angered me on a visceral level. I don’t earnestly engage with conspiracists who fret about Satan worshippers or baby-eaters, for instance, and I have always found those who do amusing curiosities. For me, real anger has to impl

      9 min read

    • Article

      David Treuer

      Feb 4, 2019

      The Ojibwe writer on Elizabeth Warren, the problem with tragedy, and his new book, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee

      2 min read

    • Article

      Toni Morrison, Whose Soaring Novels Were Rooted In Black Lives, Dies At 88

      Aug 6, 2019

      Morrison was the author of Beloved, Song of Solomon and The Bluest Eye. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

      4 min read

    • Article

      ‘I Hear The Screams’: 107-year-old Survivor Of 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Testifies To Congress In Call For Justice

      May 20, 2021

      Moments after falling asleep on 31 May, 1921, seven-year-old Viola Fletcher was awakened by her family and told to leave her home in the Greenwood neighbourhood of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Outside, a white mob drove thousands of Black residents from their ho

      3 min read

    • Article

      The Emergency

      Mar 19, 2022

      The Emergency
      17 min read

    • Article

      Why These Children Fell into Endless Sleep

      Sep 22, 2021

      I had barely stepped foot over the threshold and I already felt claustrophobic. I wanted to turn back. People shuffled into the room in front of me, while somebody else stood directly behind me, a little too close. It felt hard to escape. I could see

      12 min read

    • Article

      Barefoot Surgeons

      Feb 15, 2021

      Barefoot Surgeons
      21 min read

    • Article

      One Heart After Another

      Aug 25, 2022

      One Heart After Another
      4 min read

    • Article

      Exploring The Boundaries

      May 31, 2018

      The human body: a horse gliding through a field. A monkey skipping between branches. A comet hurtling through the black moors of space. The human body can be these things, or anything, without pain. Sontag famously declared that “everyone who is born

      16 min read

    • Article

      The Unexplained Visitor

      Nov 25, 2019

      The Unexplained Visitor
      6 min read

    • Article

      Wait Times

      Mar 29, 2021

      Wait Times
      16 min read

    • Article

      What We Get Wrong About Dying

      Dec 28, 2017

      My first exposure to the death of a patient came during my third year of medical school, in Israel. It was my first clinical rotation, which happened to be in internal medicine. Tagging along with my mentor, a senior physician to whom I had been assi

      12 min read

    • Article

      I’ve Been Stabbed!

      Jun 30, 2022

      I’ve Been Stabbed!
      5 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Beneath the Lion's Gaze

    4/5

    110 ratings15 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      This book is absolutely heartbreaking, yet the underlying message is that family is the greatest source of strength in a time of adversity. The story is of a man and his family in the midst of Ethiopia's brutal Communist regime of the 1970s and 80s. It is beautiful and poignant, with a timeless message. Good luck getting through this one with a dry eye.
    • 3/5
      This is a bit of a tough read at times, with a great many gruesome torture scenes, but ultimately I found it compelling. It follows a particular well-to-do family in Ethiopia during the "revolution" and terror of the 1970s, along with some of their acquaintances – all in all it amounts to a huge and unwieldy cast. Unfortunately this means that most of the characters seem rather two-dimensional, but the sheer breadth of the work distracted me from that while reading.

      This novel's main strength is the unflinching detail in describing the horror of dictatorship. It's really unfortunate that within the text such dictatorship is equated with "communism", as if intense repression was in any way the same thing as the democratic control of society by the working class, but y'know, Stalinism (and McCarthyism too, I suppose) should really take the blame for that. The other problem with the novel is that there are some rather unbelievable twists in the plot (mostly where the Colonel apparently had his own daughter arrested for handing out pamphlets, and she somehow without his authorisation got brutally tortured? how exactly was that supposed to have worked?!), as well as some turns that just didn't seem to come from anywhere. But nonetheless, I thought the novel evoked imagery very well – images of Ethiopia, of totalitarian regimes, etc.

      I'd really feel more comfortable giving this three and a half; four seems too generous but three too harsh, considering that despite all the flaws I mentioned above I still found this gripping. I guess I would recommend this more as dystopian fiction than historical, and if you're coming at it from that interest, you'll probably enjoy it more.
    • 5/5
      The first half of Beneath the Lion's Gaze tells of the downfall of Haile Selassie, emperor of Ethiopia and self professed king of kings, and the subsequent brutal rise of the Derg. Selassie's rein as emperor was, at first, a positive and influential one. Then in the early 70s popular opinion shifted as gas prices rose, food shortages become more frequent, and middle class workers went on strike. Famine was widespread and public outcry was loud. Tensions came to a head when a splinter group of the military overthrew the government, taking the great and powerful Selassie with it. Peppered throughout the historical tale are the human interest elements centered around one family. Hailu, a physician loyal to Selassie is witness to the brutalities of torture while his wife quietly dies of congestive heart failure. He eventually is arrested after aiding in the death of a tortured prisoner. This prisoner, a brutalized teenage girl becomes a focus of mystery. The reader doesn't know her significance to Hailu and Selassie until the end. Meanwhile Hailu's sons are on either side of the political fence. His older son, a professor, is the sensible one. Married with a family, he tries to stay neutral in the conflict. Hailu's younger son is caught up in student protests and eagerly hands out pamphlets stoking the fires out outrage. Both sides will eventually feel the effects of being under the powerful and violent thumb of the Derg.
    • 3/5
      As historical this only partly worked. It gave the history and a feeling of how horrible it would have been to live in Ethiopia then. However, it failed to give muchof an impression of what Addis Ababa was like.
    • 5/5
      In the 1970s, Emperor Haile Selassie's regime brings famine and growing discontent among the people. The civil war that ensues sees greater tragedy, fear with a military that grows in power and Communistic fervor. This civil war forms the background of a family torn asunder in the process. A prominent doctor, Dr Hailu, suffers through his wife's death, is confused by his younger son's growing distance and dangerous pursuit of revolution, and is brought sharply to the present by a young girl severely tortured, brought to him by 2 soldiers with orders that he heal her. The idealism of those who fought with the military to bring down Emperor Selassie's regime is quickly and shockingly smashed when news break that the entire cabinet and the Prime Minister had been executed in the night without the trial the military promised. With the later execution of the Emperor, Ethiopia's citizens now live on ration cards and curfews set by the military who court the Soviet Union, Cuba and North Korea. Revolutionaries continue their dangerous quest to drum up more support to overthrow the current government, spies live among neighbors, and a new prison is built, into which many are brought by soldiers, but few are seen to leave. All Dr Hailu wants is to have his family around him, and for him to continue doing his work at the hospital. But after he himself is summoned to the prison, his beliefs are severely tested, and he has to draw on reserves he did not know he possessed to keep his family safe.Into this chaos, we also see a weak and poor boy, who finds himself in and believing the uniform, who later hates the uniform but fears life for himself and his mother without it. Can he find a way to accept his orders without losing his soul?The amount of tension and hopelessness in this book is what makes it a compelling read. It leaves the reader to consider if it's better to live with devil you know or if it's better to risk opening Pandora's Box.
    • 4/5
      This is a beautifully written yet difficult to read book about Ethiopia in the 1970s. Difficult to read mainly due to the violence and oppression that is all to characteristic of African novels I've read but to a lesser extent due to the large cast of characters. I learned many things from this novel including that although Haile Selassie was respected as a world leader (and revered by Rastafarians) he was thought cruel in Ethiopia. I learned that there was a major famine in 1972-74 and a revolution that overthrew the emperor and in his place reigned the Derg who imprisoned and executed tens of thousands of people. This novel tells the story of these troubled times through one family all facing difficult choices amid the horrors of war and oppression. It took me a long time to finish this book, but I'm glad I did. Thomas Jefferson wrote "Travel makes a person wiser, if less happy." I think reading around the world has the same effect.
    • 2/5
      A very dark story about a very dark time. War is bad; civil war is very bad. It can tear families apart, both literally (through death) and figuratively (through betrayal and secrecy). Set in 1979 Ethiopia, a time of revolution and counter-revolution, the author shows in graphic detail the evils of war.
    • 4/5
      In this gripping story of a family during the reign of Haile Selassie, the Ethiopian emperor. He defined the words corruption, incompetence, and apathy. One of the fascinating aspects of this book was seeing how people dealt with living under such regimes. Dawit's family was not poor but actually relatively stable, if that is possible. The parents wanted it to stay that way. His mother chose to turn a blind eye to injustice, any injustice, and blame the victim. His father resisted when he was young and was utterly crushed. His hopes to overthrow the government had died long ago. Dawit's convictions were met with suspicion and fear, an attitude that was entirely justifiable considering. The story is filled with heartbreak but it is an important one to tell.
    • 4/5
      Dawit's mother is dying and his family struggles to keep it together amidst an Ethiopian revolution. Then, Dawit chooses to support the revolution despite his father's wishes. Then to add another challenge, Dawit finds himself on the opposite side of the fight than his childhood friend Mickey. The whole revolution changes what Dawit and his family new to be normal. After his mother dies, and his father goes to rail, it's just a matter of time before everything falls apart. Beneath the Lion's Gaze is a story about challenges and how to overcome them.
    • 4/5
      Very good, interesting read. Enjoyed the characters.
    • 4/5
      I don't write many reviews so lets see how this goes...It was a tragic but engrossing story that has left me wanting to know more about what transpired in both Ethiopia and Eritrea at the time. The book is very focused on the characters but it's set on an epic backdrop and I found the balance between the small details and big picture worked really well. There were plenty of times when I might have wanted to know more background but it probably would have been distracting and the story wouldn't have been nearly as compelling. Many of the events were heartbreaking and tough to stomach which did slow me down a bit but the characters always kept pulling me back. Overall it was a very enjoyable book.The focus was always the story more than anything for me but I did enjoy the writing too. I liked the pacing as it jumped between characters. The use of small side-events also helped and gave the book something of a film-like feel at times. I would definitely recommend this book and I haven't even set it down for a day before somebody else in my house is picking it up.
    • 4/5
      A heartbreaking and tragic story of a family in Ethiopia at the time of Haile Selassies deposition. A father and his two sons struggle to survive against terrible odds. Very moving.
    • 4/5
      A disturbing story about human rights abuses that occurred during the Derg's rise and reign in Ethiopia, in the 1970's. And Maaza Mengiste doesn't flinch from the gory details--in fact, she indulges in them, which makes this book hard to read... at least for me. My soul felt cut up by the end, because of how much the characters suffered in this book.Beneath the Lion's Gaze follows the lives of one family and their friends and neighbors throughout the height of Ethiopia's changeover to communism. The author tells their story well, though perhaps somewhat jerkily, as her words just don't have that flow that is the signature of the best writers. On the plus side, Mengiste is a masterful story-creator, if not teller. She does pull one into the narrative just by the gripping strength of the plot. I know I expose my own ignorance in saying this, but I never knew any of this occurred, even though I have several Ethiopian friends from college and my travels. More than anything, I'm grateful to Mengiste for opening my eyes. I'm thinking of recommending it for my book club.
    • 4/5
      Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie, who claimed to be descended from King David and thought of himself as the Conquering Lion of Judah and the beloved of God, was deposed and later executed. Some were horrified, but others expected better things for Ethiopia upon the forming of a new government. This was not to be. As is usually the case in the overthrow of a government, the military regime was treacherous and intended to exercise complete control over the country and its citizens. In time, a resistance movement was formed. You probably know the history, which serves as the background for this tale of families and friends.The main family consists of a father and a mother and their two grown sons, one daughter-in-law, and one granddaughter. The sons find themselves with opposing viewpoints and become estranged from each other. This, of course is terribly difficult for the father, whose wife is in the hospital, desperately ill.People are arrested for no real reason and tortured. Most die. The torture scenes are well-written. They give you a picture you can almost see, without being overly long. In some novels, the torture scenes seem to be so drawn out, they become boring rather than horrifying.As a scare tactic, which worked, people are killed, and their bodies are thrown out into the streets. Anyone who tries to move the bodies is pushed back and told to leave the bodies alone or face death. Eventually, several persons form a body-retrieval operation, and at great risk to themselves, remove the bodies and take them to a burial spot.There is a sadness which prevails throughout the story, but how could there not be? The above paragraphs don’t begin to cover all that happened.This book made me cry more than once, and I found myself holding my breath occasionally. I could almost feel the despair, the heat, the humiliations, the fear, and the hunger. The author has a knack for description but is not verbose – a welcome relief.
    • 5/5
      This is a heart-wrenching story of a father and his two sons set approximately 30 years ago, during the Ethiopian revolution. The war torn country has a face when this story unfolds and we first experience the mother giving up everything that is dear to her. The struggles of the people in one small close knit community (keble)are laid open to be used against their own family and friends and neighbors. This is a very sad and disturbing read.