The Zanzibar Chest: A Story of Life, Love, and Death in Foreign Lands

Combining literary reportage, memoir, family history, and a quest to piece together a decades-old mystery, The Zanzibar Chest is a moving examination of colonialism and its consequences.

In his final days, Aidan Hartley’s father said to him, “We should have never come.” Those words spoke of a colonial legacy that stretched back through four generations of one British family. From a great-great-grandfather who defended British settlements in nineteenth-century New Zealand, to his…