Voyage in the Dark (Penguin Modern Classics) Book

'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 Her childish dreams have been replaced by harsh reality.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.

Eighteen on her own and independent as much through circumstance as character Anna has exchanged the West Indies of her childhood for the cold greyness of England with its narrow streets and narrower rules. As she drifts towards the demi-monde of 1914 London she comes to realise that life will never be so free and easy again.