The Zanzibar Chest : A Memoir of Love and War - Softcover

Hartley, Aidan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0006531210 ISBN 13: 9780006531210

Publisher: Harper Perennial, 2004

Synopsis

London. 20 cm. XII, 446 p. : ill., ports. Encuadernación en tapa blanda de editorial ilustrada. Idioma Inglés. Originally published: London: HarperCollins, 2003 .. Este libro es de segunda mano y tiene o puede tener marcas y señales de su anterior propietario. ISBN: 9780006531210 (pbk.); 0006531210 (pbk.)

About this title

About the Author:

Aidan Hartley was born in 1965 and raised 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 Africa, the Balkans, the Middle East and Russia. In 1996 he began travelling and writing on his own.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

In the corner of the veranda was a Zanzibar chest, carved with a skill modern Swahili carpenters have forgotten. The old camphor box bore a design of lotus, paisley, and pineapple, and was studded with rivets tarnished green in the salty air. When I opened the chest lid, cobwebs tore and something scuttled into a corner.

Inside one box file were my father’s hand-written memoirs on which he had been working for years. I opened a second file and reached down to grasp the pages. The instant I touched them they began to crumble in my hands. Time, heat, and the drenching humidity had ravaged them. Mildew dusted the covers, giving off that scent of the forgotten.

I quickly realized I had stumbled on a secret that had been buried for half a century. Here were the diaries of the man named Peter Davey, my father’s good friend. Ever since I was a boy, the story of Davey crept in and out of conversation at home in vague, half-finished sentences. The tale had always been there, yet my father never properly talked about it. Davey was a silence, a shadow that moved constantly out of the corner of one’s eye. And now, as if it had been deliberately dropped into my lap, was the full and tragic rendition of Davey’s life.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0006531210
• ISBN 13: 9780006531210
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320