Night’s Bright Darkness: A Modern Conversion Story
SALLY READ
It is surprising to see an acclaimed poet make her prose debut in a genre which in recent years has acquired a reputation for being, well, prosaic. But Sally Read is not your garden variety Catholic convert, and Night’s Bright Darkness is not your usual conversion memoir.
Although Read seeks to show how her Catholic faith brought her peace, her literary voice is feverish. To read her story is to be placed inside the mind of a woman who awakens from a long nightmare to find that her fight-or-flight hormones are still active in her brain.
Facts about the author’s life are released sparingly. Read writes that she was raised an atheist; we do not learn where she grew up or how many siblings she has. At one moment, she is a 26-year-old psychiatric nurse in London coping with her father’s death; at the next she is 34, living in Sardinia with her policeman husband.
