Roy Peachey

Between Darkness and Light Roy Peachey

'A shape flew towards him, blurred and uncertain, then the terror of anticipation was driven out by pain and horror. Weilian Tell missed the apple. The arrow's sharp, bright tip pierced his eyeball.'

Shanghai 1900. Blinded in one eye during a childhood game of William Tell, Wang Weijun loses himself in a world of magic, languages and Shakespeare. When the Great War begins, he seizes the opportunity to leave his past behind by signing up as a translator for the Chinese Labour Corps. However, what he finds in France jolts him out of his one-eyed admiration for the West and plunges him into a new and wholly unexpected battle in which east and west, tragedy and comedy, love and suffering meet, and the darkness of war is illuminated in ways he could never have anticipated.

Shortlisted for the Impress Prize for New Writers, Between Darkness and Light is a novel about blindness, an unconventional love story, a war novel in which there is no fighting, and a post-war novel about the meeting of East and West.