THE HISTORY OF A DIFFICULT CHILD

A captivating tragicomic family saga set in a small town in Ethiopia, told through the perspective of its funny, charming and occasionally irritating narrator, Difficult Child takes the reader into the heart of the Asmelash family, former landowners who are hated by the community of nosy women in the town.

Wisecracking, inquisitive, and bombastic, Selam Asmelash, the youngest child in her large, boisterous family, beguiles the reader with her wry omniscience before she even emerges from her mother's cancerous uterus. Her voice, at once brash and vulnerable, brings the book to vibrant life and provides a perspective both intimate and sweeping: a small Ethiopian town in the 80's, floundering in the social upheaval induced by a socialist dictatorship, civil war and famine; a formerly land-owning family, stripped of their property after the revolution and persecuted for their conversion to Pentecostalism; and of course gossipy neighbors, a greek chorus that documents all the turmoil--personal and political.

As she grows up, Selam, wise beyond her years yet thoroughly naive, must contend with poverty, bullies, and the death of loved ones. She deals with all of it through humor and megalomania, endowing herself with various powers to gain control of her situation and escape sadness. Will she succeed? The answer is not immediately apparent as The History of a Difficult Child is the first book of a planned trilogy that continues to follow Selam into her teenage years as an aspiring evangelist and exorcist and her adulthood in America as an atheist lesbian. Described as "Elena Ferrante meets Abraham Verghese meets Gabriel Garcia Marquez," The History of a Difficult Child will also appeal to readers of Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie.

Mihret Sibhat grew up in a Pentecostal family in a southwestern Ethiopian town. She moved to the United States when she was seventeen, and attended Santa Monica College and Cal State Northridge for her BA in politics, and then did her MFA in creative writing at the University of Minnesota. She has worked in many jobs. At sixteen she was performing exorcisms and preaching. In the US, she worked as an undocumented waitress in an LA Ethiopian restaurant, and also as a nanny, shoeshiner, uber driver, office manager, and radio presenter for an Ethiopian political group. In a previous life, she was a nun, and in this one she is also queer af.