Today's bookish travels bring us back together once again with Rachel's Random Resources, and this time, we've a stopover from author Leela Dutt as she shares her latest work as well as some experience too! So, if you're ready to add to your TBR, have a seat as we welcome today's title and author to the spotlight...
A Distant Voice in the Darkness
by
Leela Dutt
About the book...
"A distant voice in the darkness... So on the ocean of life we pass" - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
A chance meeting at university leads to a relationship that spans marriages, the world and the decades in this sweeping and fulfilling novel from acclaimed author Leela Dutt, a story that reaches from the British countryside, through the glamour of Rome and the exhilaration of India to the turbulence of the South African invasion of Lesotho. Through it all, Eleanor Larsen-Bruun pursues a successful career and yet never loses her love for the man she met so many years before. At the peak of her success, fate seems to offer the chance to begin again something that was started so many years before...
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~~~ GUEST POST ~~~
HOW TO TURN YOUR LETTERS INTO A NOVEL
by Author Leela Dutt
I’m Leela Dutt and I used to write a lot of letters to friends when I went abroad. They liked them, and one day someone told me that the letters I sent his family were a lot more interesting than the novels and short stories I’d written.
Eeeeek!
In response to this challenge I wrote a novel called A DISTANT VOICE IN THE DARKNESS which was published in autumn 2022 by 186 Publishing Limited. It’s about a couple, Eleanor and Alec, who fall in love at university, split up and spend the next quarter of a century running into each other again in places like Copenhagen, Lesotho, Kolkata, St Petersburg, the Grand Canyon and so on… As you do.
Before they split up, Alec takes Eleanor to Nigeria to stay with the family of his uncle, who is a lecturer at the University of Ife, as it was called. I based the details in this chapter on the year my family spent there when my husband Robin Attfield taught philosophy at Ife. Alec’s aunt Val is seen as a university wife, who sits by the kidney-shaped University Staff Pool where her children swim, and has been persuaded by a Black American friend that you have to employ domestic staff because the local people need the work. Val is in awe of Mbibi their cook-steward, older than her and to whom she is expected to give instructions. In the next door garden the professor’s wife Mrs Adejuyigbe keeps lively clucking chickens, which Mbibi buys, plucks and cooks for the couple’s dinner parties, but Val wishes she could just pick up a chicken that was already dead from a shelf in Sainsbury’s. I based Mbibi in the book entirely on my memories of our own estimable steward. He was a faithful man, who was deeply grieved when Jo, one of our young children, fell ill and lay on the sofa with a terrifyingly high temperature, with the fan constantly trained on her – I wish I’d put that episode in the novel.
I grew up in Golders Green with an Indian father and a Danish mother, so of course Copenhagen was an important part of my childhood, and we also took our children to Kolkata when we could afford to. I made Eleanor half-Danish in the novel. She goes to Copenhagen to draw sketches for a book and spends time with her cousin, reliving some of their childhood adventures. I based their memories of their grandparents during the German Occupation on my own grandfather, who had a very young German soldier stationed outside his home during the war – every morning the lad said good morning to my grandfather, who ignored him and pretended there was no one there. Alec’s young children are invited to climb on the statue of Hans Christian Andersen in the famous City Hall Square to be photographed for a brochure, as my own children once were, an event which leads to a crucial encounter.
I sent both Alec and Eleanor to Kolkata and Darjeeling in 1989. Alec makes a TV documentary about the Partition of the sub-continent in 1947, and when he goes to interview two elderly survivors, I use my own father’s family home, where the Dutt family have lived for three hundred years.
The climax of the novel comes with the South African armed invasion of Lesotho, in which Eleanor is accidentally caught up. She tries to drive out of the country to collect supplies for the hospital, and is shot at a roadblock. I was enormously helped in this by our daughter Jo, who was teaching there at the time, and when she returned from being evacuated, she sent me all the press cuttings she could find about the invasion. Jo’s letters home during the invasion also contributed to the novel; letters do matter!
For further details see my website, attfieldduttbooks.co.uk. My YouTube channel is called Leela Dutt, and features several short videos where I read stories or discuss issues. I’m on Facebook as Leela Attfield.
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About the author...
Leela Dutt is an outsider, an only child brought up in Golders Green by an Indian father and a Danish mother. She has travelled all her life since the day her mother had to tuck the toddler under her arm while she struggled up a steep metal ladder on the side of a warship in order to be taken to Denmark.
Leela lives in Cardiff. After history at Oxford she was briefly a teacher, a shop assistant and a journalist. She then took a degree in computing, and set up and ran a database about housing research for Cardiff University, before joining the Big Issue Cymru as a proof-reader and reviewer.
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Special thanks to Rachel at Rachel's Random Resources for the chance to bring this tour to you and to the author for the guest post. (THANKS!) For more information on this title, the author, this tour, or those on the horizon, feel free to click through the links provided above. This title is available now, so click on over to your favorite online retailer to snag your copy today! Be sure to check out the rest of the sites participating for more bookish fun...
Until next time, remember...if it looks good, READ IT!
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