An earlier version of this book was published in paperback in 1975. In 2013, I rewrote THE QUEST, doubling its length and making it, I hope, a far better book than the original, without deviating from the elements that made the story so powerful and compelling when I first wrote it.
At the time of my original writing in 1975, 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 into chaos.
As a history and political science major in college, and as a news junkie all my life, I was interested in Ethiopia as an ancient, isolated, almost biblical civilization that was being dragged bloodily into the twentieth century. I felt that a novel set against this backdrop 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.