A Distant Voice in the Darkness

ROMANCE

Pages: 204 Ratings:

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In 1972 Wales, Eleanor Larsen-Bruun, a headstrong young student with a mind for science, finds herself caught in a smoky university kitchen with Alec Jenkins, a fellow first-year with untamed black hair, large NHS glasses, and a talent for chaos. What begins as a spontaneous attempt to salvage a burnt chicken sparks a surprising friendship – and a tender, complicated romance.

Their story unfolds across vibrant settings, from the mist-covered hills of Wales to the bustling markets of Nigeria and the timeless streets of Rome. As they confront challenges both personal and cultural, Eleanor and Alec navigate family expectations, career ambitions, and the weight of the past. With each new chapter, Eleanor must decide how much of herself to give, and what she may have to leave behind.

Leela Dutt is an outsider, brought up in Golders Green by an Indian father and a Danish mother. After grammar school and Oxford, she moved to Cardiff, Wales, where she has been a teacher, shop assistant, journalist, and also a proofreader for The Big Issue. After a degree in computing, she set up a database at Cardiff University on housing research. She is married to Robin Attfield, the philosopher; they have three children, seven grandchildren (of whom six survive), and one lively great-granddaughter. Leela and Robin are Quakers.

Leela’s earlier fiction includes two novels—Rubik’s Cube, the story of a Quaker meeting in 1980s South Wales as it confronts an American cruise missile base, and Mathison, a novel narrated by a computer (yes, they did have AI back in the day…) that is addressed to a baby born in 2000 about her ancestors through the twentieth century, starting in Kolkata in 1900 and in Nazi Germany.

She has published two collections of short stories, Kingfisher Blue and Fresh Beginnings.