'In this astonishing memoir Anna Lyndsey takes us into the world of a rare and shocking illness, and we emerge awed by a shining love story. Susannah Cahalan, author of the New York Times-bestselling Brain on Fire Yes, life is suffering, but in the end, as Anna Lyndsey so aptly puts it, ‘Words are wonderful.’ This book is a gift, a testament to the power of art as a saving grace.' I read this book, a memoir that reads like an epic poem, pen in hand, feverishly underlining sentence after sentence. But this story is so much more than a medical mystery or a nightmarishly true tale. 'The premise of Girl in the Dark seems lifted out of a Gothic novel: a woman whose flesh is burned by light is confined to a dark box of a room. Working gingerly with the array of metaphors that emerge from darkness and offering small, telling details, Lyndsey achieves a powerful assertion of self against the eclipse of all that she used to hold dear in the realm of light.' The author’s intelligence shines on every page, and her will to survive (despite those black thoughts in her dark room) is inspiring.' 'An extraordinary memoir … Girl In The Dark is beautifully written. ' sparkles with dark humour and wonder at the world … beautifully affecting … A tribute to the power of humanity, generosity and endurance, Girl in the Dark is incredibly powerful stuff.' She doesn’t give up, but keeps looking for ways to stay sharp.' 'What stays with the reader is gutsiness, her imagination and fortitude. Anna Lyndsey is both close observer and philosopher, capable of describing her world and also of pondering what it signifies.'

reveals the quiet, ingenious consciousness of a poet. A gorgeous writer of rare honesty and wit.' It brings us to an extraordinary place from which we emerge to see the light and the world anew. Girl in the Dark is a tale of an unimaginable fate that becomes a transcendent love story. But even impossible lives, she learns, endure. One day Anna had an ordinary life, and then the unthinkable happened. And through it all there is Pete, her love and her rock, without whom her loneliness seems boundless. During periods of relative remission, she can venture out cautiously at dawn and dusk into a world that, from the perspective of her cloistered existence, is filled with remarkable beauty. Now, at the worst times, Anna is forced to 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. Then what started as a mild intolerance to certain kinds of artificial light developed into a severe sensitivity to all light. Haunting, lyrical, unforgettable, Girl in the Dark is a brave new memoir of a life without light.Īnna Lyndsey was young and ambitious and worked hard she had just bought an apartment she was falling in love.

Girl in the Dark by Anna Lyndsey