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The Zanzibar Chest – A Memoir of Love and War

“We should never have come!” so said Aidan Hartley`s father in his final days, rising from a bed made of mountain cedar, lashed with thongs of rawhide from an oryx shot many years before. His words spoke of a colonial legacy that stretched back over 150 years through four generations of one British family.In The Zanzibar Chest, Hartley weaves together his family`s history, his childhood in Africa and his accounts of the continent`s horrendous wars, which he witnessed at first hand as a journalist in the 1990s.Burnt out from a decade of horror, during which three of his close friends were torn to pieces by an angry mob in Somalia, Aidan retreats to his family`s house in Kenya, where he discovers the Zanzibar chest containing the diaries of his father`s best friend, Peter Davey, an Englishman who died under mysterious circumstances more than fifty years earlier. Tucking the papers under his arm, Hartley embarks on a journey to southern Arabia in an effort not only to unlock the secrets of Davey`s life, but of his own. Travelling to the remote deserts where his father served as a British officer, Aidan begins to piece together the disparate elements of Davey`s story, a man who fell in love with an Arabian woman and converted to Islam, but ultimately had to pay an exacting price.At once a modern and a historic love story, The Zanzibar Chest is also an epic narrative charting the fates of men and women who embraced and were ultimately transformed by foreign lands.

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