The Quest

Author’s Note

An earlier version of this book was published almost forty years ago, and when I wrote The Quest, the historical events that take place in this book — the Ethiopian revolution and civil war — were recent history. The old emperor, Haile Selassie, known as the Lion of Judah, had been deposed and died in captivity, and Ethiopia was plunged in chaos.

As a history and political science major in college, and as a news junkie all my life, Ethiopia interested me as an ancient isolated, almost biblical civilization that was being dragged bloodily into the twentieth century. Also, according to family history, some of my Italian forebearers had fought with the Italian Army when Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1895, and again when Mussolini invaded in 1936. Thus, my interest in this country was piqued by that family history, and I thought a novel set against this background of a three-thousand-year-old royal dynasty coming to an end at the hands of Marxist revolutionaries would make for a great epic story in the vein of Doctor Zhivago, which I had recently read. Now, forty years later, I see that this story of war, love, and loss is timeless.

There is always some literary license taken when writing a novel, but the historical events in this story happened — or at least happened according to the news media of the day whose reporting was my main source of information as I was writing The Quest. I did take some license with the terrain and geography for the sake of drama, but the country I described in 1975 was still very much uncharted and dangerous — a perfect setting for an adventure into the heart of darkness.