The Last Colony: A Tale of Exile, Justice and Britain’s Colonial Legacy
PHILIPPE SANDS
(WEIDENFELD & NICOLSON, 224 PP, £16.99)
Tablet bookshop price £15.29 • tel 020 7799 4064

Philippe Sands’ latest book is written out of a boiling sense of injustice, distilled into a forensic account of international malfeasance, seasoned with irony and barely concealed contempt, and accompanied by hard-hitting illustrations by Martin Rowson. It relates the chilling tale of Britain’s wholesale removal of the population of the Chagos Archipelago – a tropical atoll in the Indian Ocean, until the early 1970s the paradisal home of a peaceable Creole-speaking community –in the wake of its secret decision to lease to the US a military base on one of the islands, Diego Garcia. Liseby Elysé was one of those islanders, forced at the age of 20, and pregnant with her first child, to pack her entire life into one trunk and set sail for Mauritius, from where she has spent half a century fighting, alongside her family and with Sands’ assistance, to gain the right to return.