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The Zanzibar Chest

A Memoir of Love and War

Aidan Hartley

In The Zanzibar Chest, Aidan Hartley weaves together his family’s history, his childhood in Africa and his accounts of the continents’ horrendous wars, which he witnessed at first hand as a journalist in the 1990s. After the end of the Cold War, there seemed to be new hope for Africa but again and again in Ethiopia, Somalia, Rwanda and the Congo, terror and genocide prevailed. 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.

First published:
2003
Published by:
HarperCollins
Length:
Hardcover 414 pages

About the author

Aidan Hartley was born in 1965 and brought up in East Africa. He read English at Balliol College, Oxford and later politics at London University. He joined Reuters as a foreign correspondent and has worked in the Balkans, The Middle East and Russia. He lives in Kenya with his wife and two children.