Girl in the Dark A Memoir of a Life Without Light

One woman's unthinkable fate becomes a transcendent love story, offering an extraordinary perspective from which we can see light and the world anew. 

“Extraordinarily vivid.... [Lyndsey] has found new ways to look at the world, out of the darkness.” —The Washington Post

Even impossible lives endure.

Once, Anna Lyndsey had an ordinary life. She was young and ambitious and worked hard, she had just bought an apartment, she was falling in love. Then what began as a mild intolerance to certain kinds of artificial light developed into a severe sensitivity to all light. Now, at the worst times, Anna must 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. During periods of relative remission, she can venture out cautiously at dawn or dusk into a world that overwhelms her starved senses with its beauty.

Anna Lyndsey is a pen name. Lyndsey worked for several years in London as a civil servant until she became ill. She now lives with her husband in Hampshire, England.