Excerpt from Girl in the Dark by Anna Lyndsey, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

In the dark, although I listen to both, I prefer tapes to CDs. I am less likely to press the wrong button and become lost among the tracks, accidentally skipping forwards or entering a different mode, so that the sections unfurl in random order, or one repeats itself on an endless loop. In order to reverse what I have done, I have to carry my boombox downstairs, and peer at the tiny display as I poke away in the gloom.

I get to know the voices that speak to me from the corner of my dark room. There is the tough, macho chap with slightly Estuary vowels, who reads a lot of action thrillers. There is the deep-toned, chocolate-smooth voice, whose male characters are dashing and manly, but whose females, rendered in falsetto, all sound faintly imbecilic. There is the elegiac, lugubrious Michael Jayston, who specialises in the world-weary melancholy of P. D. James and John le Carre, and Miriam Margolyes, who creates so many characters with such distinctive voices that it is difficult to believe that there is only one woman in there, and not a troupe.

When I finish a book, I find I cannot start another one immediately. Each book needs time to settle in my mind, to be digested like a meal of many courses. It seems disrespectful to the characters to move on too quickly--after all, I have spent hours in their company, learnt their histories, looked on at significant moments of their lives. I still have nagging questions echoing in my mind: surely someone would have noticed the substitution of the bodies? Why in American crime fiction do people eat so much pizza?

During these intermissions, I put on Radio 4. It can be counted on to provide an unceasing stream of trivial earnestness, a gentle showerbath for the soul.



Moving About

When I am first in the dark, I frequently get lost. Even though the room is only a small space filled with simple objects--a bed, a bookshelf, a wardrobe, a bureau--the darkness can cause disorientation that is total, and terrifying. In my early days I find myself patting my hands across surfaces I cannot identify, feeling frantically for some sort of clue. Often my mind is absolutely convinced I am sitting on the floor facing in one direction, and then my hands start telling me something else. I cry out. The cognitive dissonance is overwhelming, like a physical rending of my brain.

But this rarely happens now. I am in my element. I move confidently about my box of darkness, lay my hand easily on the cotton-covered firmness of the bed, grasp the chair in the corner by the smooth curved poles that form its back, reach for the cool metal handle of the door and hear its catlike creak.

Sometimes I lose a sock, or my hairbrush, but there is no panic now, I feel calmly in each likely place, slowly passing from one to the other, and usually the object is found.

Gradually I do what is not in my nature; I develop routines: socks always go there, spectacles there. One day I reorganise my underwear drawer so that knickers are on the left and bras on the right. This puts an end to wild morning burrowing and flailing--I wonder why I have not done it before. But I know the answer to that. Simply--hope. Hope held me back. Each small accommodation of my physical environment is an admission that things are not improving, that this is not some fleeting horror, that perhaps?.?.?.

But that is the unthinkable thought.

There is only one circumstance, now, where I can lose my orientation. Sometimes, in one of my small attempts to keep moving, to keep the blood flowing, I march on the spot. Often, I find, after a few minutes, that I have turned through 90 degrees, that the bed, rather than being beside me, is in front.

An anecdote told by a character in a thriller brings me the explanation. A man, lost in the Sahara, decides the best way out is to walk forward in a straight line. After several miles, he finds himself in the place where he started. Human legs are never of exactly equal length; you may believe you walk straight ahead, but slowly, imperceptibly, your course will curve, you will tread a circle, and your beginning will be your end.

Excerpted from Girl in the Dark by Anna Lyndsey. Copyright © 2015 by Anna Lyndsey. Excerpted by permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.