Book of the Week | Girl In The Dark by Anna Lyndsey

Today I want to share a book that I’ve been anxiously wanting to read, but I’ve been waiting for it to be physically in my hands.

The first time I saw this book on a shelf I immediately fell in love with the cover which led me to read the description and add it to my reading list. The only problem is that I have no more room on my bookshelf or in our tiny apartment, so how do I choose which book to replace so that I can add this gem to my collection? Thoughts?

Well, my birthday is coming up so maybe I will just treat myself and figure out where to store this in my apartment after I read it. #BookLoverProblems

TITLE: Girl in the Dark: A Memoir of a Life Without Light

AUTHOR: Anna Lyndsey

PUBLISHER: DoubleDay

RELEASE DATE: March 3, 2015

GENRE: Memoir

BUY LINKS: AMAZON | B&N | INDIEBOUND

Even impossible lives endure.

Once, Anna Lyndsey had an ordinary life. She was young and ambitious and worked hard, she had just bought an apartment, she was falling in love. Then what began as a mild intolerance to certain kinds of artificial light developed into a severe sensitivity to all light. Now, at the worst times, Anna must spend months on end in a blacked-out room, where she loses herself in audiobooks and elaborate word games in an attempt to ward off despair. During periods of relative remission, she can venture out cautiously at dawn or dusk into a world that overwhelms her starved senses with its beauty.

Eventually, Anna’s unthinkable fate becomes a transcendent love story, offering an extraordinary perspective from which we can see light and the world anew.

About Anna Lyndsey: Anna Lyndsey is a pen name. Lyndsey for several years in London as a civil servant until she became ill. She now lives with her husband in Hampshire, England.

EXCERPT

Light Gets In

It is extraordinarily difficult to black out a room.

First I line the curtains with blackout material, a heavy, plasticky fabric, strange flesh-like magnolia in colour, not actually black. But the light slips in easily, up and over the gap between the rail and the wall, and at the bottom through the loops made by the hanging folds.

So I add a blackout roller blind, inside the window alcove. But the light creeps in around the sides, and shimmies through the slit at the top.

So I tackle the panes themselves. I cut sheets of cooking foil, press them against the glass, tape them to the window frames. But the foil wrinkles and rips, refuses to lie flat. Gaps persist around the edges, pinpricks and tears across the middle. I tape and tape, tape over tape, foil over foil, layer upon layer. Instead of neat sheets of foil tethered by single strips of tape, the thing is becoming wild installation art. But I can’t stop. The light is laughing at me; it is playing deliberate games, lying low to persuade me that I have made an area secure, then as soon as I move on, wriggling through some overlooked wormhole. The day beyond my window is an ocean, pressing and pulsing at my protecting walls, and I must plug a leaky dike perpetually against its power.

At last, I think I may have done enough. I lower the blind on my crazy patchwork of foil, pull the curtains, place a rolled-up towel along the crack at the bottom of the door. I sit quietly on the bed, and wait for my eyes to adjust.

And I have it. Finally I have it. I have blackness.

I lie back inside my box of darkness, the new container for my life. I am overwhelmed with exhaustion and relief.

(Description and Excerpt found on Knopfdoubleday.com)

Follow Stories Unfolded on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and Goodreads