The Book of Color — Julia Blackburn

In the late 19th century, an English missionary arrives on a remote island in the Indian Ocean, intent on wiping out fornication among the natives. Instead he incurs a curse that strikes first his dark-skinned wife, then his son and grandson. But is the curse supernatural -- or a white man's guilty fascination with an alien new world?

“A hypnotic, cryptic, haunting exploration of the power of memory.”
-- The Boston Globe