I am delighted to be part of the blog tour for this book and am bringing you a short extract of A Voice in the Darkness by Leela Dutt. Hope this whets your appetite.
Blurb
Eleanor walks out on her student boyfriend Alec in Cardiff in order to seek the life she really wants, publishing sketches of everything that interests her. Beginning in Rome, this takes her to Copenhagen and eventually to India, South Africa, New Zealand, Finland, Iceland, the USA and beyond. Meanwhile Alec becomes a TV presenter who also travels the world, leaving his vulnerable young family behind. Eleanor, travelling with Alec’s teenage daughter, is caught up in an armed invasion of Lesotho, and is shot at a road block while they try to escape…
Published by 186 Publishing Limited
Length 262 pages
Genre: Travel, Romance
Age category: 14 – 99
Date published: August 2022
Extract
What the hell is that hideous smell? Overpowering – burning, surely? But a hint of orange in it, surely – or am I imagining that?
Pause to get my breath back at the top of the stairs. I’m here in this hall of residence to return a book I borrowed, but the pesky girl isn’t in; it’s Friday night, she’s probably out clubbing. All right for some.
I can see smoke in the corridor now. Must be a fire. Let’s see, kitchen at the far end. Hurry, there’s someone coughing.
Open the door carefully – oh God a fog!
There’s someone in here; a very young man, peering at me through the mist. He must be a First Year student, like me, but eons younger than me. Tall, with an untidy mass of black hair that sticks straight up like a cartoon. And the most peculiar eyebrows, like a gable. He’s taken off a large pair of NHS glasses, all steamed up, and put them on the work top.
‘Oh hi,’ he says. ‘I’m not sure what’s gone wrong. I was only trying to cook a chicken for my mates…’
I barge past him and open the over door gingerly. Yes, he’s right, that blackened corpse must have been a chicken once. I grab a couple of cloths that someone’s conveniently left next to the stove and lift the dish out gently.
‘Oh, thanks! I wasn’t sure what… My name’s Alec Jenkins, by the way.’
Leela Dutt grew up in Golders Green with an Indian father and a Danish mother. After reading history at Oxford, she sold dress fabrics and became a teacher and a journalist, eventually running a database on housing research at Cardiff University. She writes novels and short stories, and has lived in Cardiff most of her life.
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