In 19th century New Zealand, Aidan Hartley's great-great-grandfather defended British settlements, while his father was a colonial officer sent to Africa in the 1920s. Aiden himself became a journalist, and in the 1990s he covered war in Somalia, famine in Ethiopia, and genocide in Rwanda. Emotionally devastated, he retreated to his family's house in Kenya, where he found the Zanzibar chest his father had left him. The intricately carved chest contained the diaries of his father's best friend Peter Davey, an Englishman who had died under ambiguous circumstances in Arabia five decades before. In this Samuel Johnson Prize finalist, Hartley embarks on a journey to unlock the secrets of Davey's life—and four generations of his own family's—in the context of 150 years of African history.