Book excerpt: Philip Marsden returns to the remote, fiercely beautiful land whose powerful mythic appeal has fascinated him all his life to explore its legacy of independence, civil war and brutal repression. Twenty years after he first fell in love with Ethiopia, Philip Marsden returns to its stunning landscapes and violent contradictions to trace the stories of the individuals he first met there as a young man. Through interviews with figures closely tied to Mengitsu's Stalinist regime, as well as the everyday people bound up in the country's civil war, its famines and its long tradition of proud independence, the author pieces together a portrait of a nation marked by both terror and beauty, torn between innocence and experience. Part travelogue, part autobiography, The Chains of Heaven will rediscover an Ethiopia that has changed dramatically over the past two decades.