For his fifth travel book, Philip Marsden has returned to his roots; not to his native Cornwall, but to the country that gave birth to his travel writing. Marsden first visited Ethiopia in the early 1980s when he was 21, when Emperor Haile Selassie was long in his grave and when the country was ruled by the Derg, a military junta led by the future dictator Mengistu. Civil war and repressive government had cast a pall of misery over the country and Marsden’s journey suffered for it — he was refused permission to travel to Tigray, the historical heartland in the north of the country and a province that had long been at odds with the administration in Addis Ababa.
If Ethiopia was, in the words of his guide, ‘a living hell’, it was also the inspiration for Marsden’s first book, A Far Country, and for an early epiphany.
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