What he knows is this: there is no past, there is no "what happened", there is only the moment that unfolds into the next, dragging everything with i… - Maaza Mengiste

I think fiction gives us a door into what is actually happening around us. There are those who don’t trust fiction, they will read history or biography, but they don’t understand that those forms of narrative are also constructed.

He is doing as she once did, in the naïve belief that what is buried stays that way, that what is hidden will stay unseen, that what is yours will remain always in your possession. He is being foolish.

Part of my concern in this book was to center the story on people who are often not written about in history—the farmers, the peasants, the servants who don’t have the social standing to make them newsworthy—because the stories that get remembered are so often about people who are already famous or noteworthy.