One book on the list:Voyage in the DarkRead about another book on the list.
by Jean Rhys
William Morrow, 1935
“It was as if a curtain had fallen, hiding everything I had ever known.... The colours were different, the smells different, the feeling things gave you right down inside yourself was different.” Thus opens Jean Rhys’s most autobiographical novel, “Voyage in the Dark.” Sent to England from her home in the West Indies, Anna Morgan becomes a chorus girl and the mistress of a much older, wealthy Englishman. When he abandons her, she is desolate, adrift in a world where “the houses are all exactly alike, and the streets going north, south, east, west, all exactly alike.” With few resources and nothing to go home to, Anna soon slips into a familiar immigrant’s cycle of drink and despair. What she (and Jean Rhys) never loses, however, is the clarity and freshness of her insights, her relentless eye for hypocrisy.
--Marshal Zeringue
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