Description

‘A wonderful bitter-sweet book, written with disarming simplicity’ Esther Freud

‘It was as if a curtain had fallen, hiding everything I had ever known,’ says Anna Morgan, eighteen years old and catapulted to England from the West Indies after the death of her beloved father. Working as a chorus girl, Anna drifts into the demi-monde of Edwardian London. But there, dismayed by the unfamiliar cold and greyness, she is absolutely alone and unconsciously floating from innocence to harsh experience. Her childish dreams have been replaced by harsh reality. Voyage in the Dark was first published in 1934, but it could have been written today. It is the story of an unhappy love affair, a portrait of a hypocritical society, and an exploration of exile and breakdown; all written in Jean Rhys’s hauntingly simple and beautiful style.

Publisher Review

Prescient and technically astonishing -- Geoff Dyer * GQ * The kind of book you want to stand up and applaud -- Caryl Phillips Every so often someone comes along whose prose style is so alert and fresh, so remote from the mainstream idiom of English social fiction that is seems miraculous that they should be able to write like that and be British too. Jean Rhys is such a writer -- Jonathan Raban [Jean Rhys's novels] have the quality of the best books by seeming to have written themselves, and reading them one flinches at truth after truth -- Howard Moss * The New Yorker *