Histria Books is pleased to announce the release of Ten Days That Shook My World: Searching For My Father In War-Torn Ethiopia by Jonathan B. Wickham. This book is published by Histria Perspectives, an imprint dedicated to publishing outstanding works of nonfiction that illuminate history, culture, and society.
In Ten Days That Shook My World, documentary filmmaker Jonathan B. Wickham travels to Ethiopia to retrace his late father’s hidden World War II service. Armed with an eighty-year-old artillery map and guided by local militia members, he searches for the exact ridges where his father fought during the East Africa campaign.
What makes this project feel so urgent is how it collapses the distance between past and present. Wickham refuses to treat military history as a detached archival exercise. Instead, he is navigating a country actively reeling from the recent Tigray conflict, climbing hills alongside Ethiopian guards who just fought their own modern wars on the exact same ground. The result is a profoundly grounded look at how violence and memory physically shape a landscape. For readers tired of traditional hero worship, Wickham offers a raw, boots-on-the-ground investigation into the inherited weight of war and the very human need to locate our parents in the wreckage of history.
Jonathan B. Wickham is a documentary filmmaker and author whose work bridges personal history and global conflict. Born in Malawi and raised in southern Africa and the UK, he holds a degree from Cambridge University. After attending film school, he built a successful career in the United States producing television documentaries, many of which focused on World War II. Ten Days That Shook My World is his debut book, turning his documentary lens toward his own family to explore how history’s greatest conflict affected those close to him, and ultimately himself too.
