Darkness Does Not Come At Once

Description

Meike is seventeen and she uses a wheelchair. Already in life she’s accepted that she’ll always somehow be ‘different’. But overnight, different becomes dangerous after the government announces disabled youngsters under the age of eighteen must spend the war in specially designated institutions.

Suddenly Meike is on the run in the rural lanes she calls home, bordering Berlin. It is 1939 and the whole of Germany, it seems, wants to fight the world.

Quietly, members of Meike’s family distance themselves, but two unlikely allies stand by her. One is an elderly woman and a lifelong Catholic, forced to question her faith; the other is a fifteen-year-old boy Meike hardly knows. They begin a search for answers as they scramble to find Meike and, in a country they no longer recognise, themselves.

Glenn Bryant is a former daily news journalist who today works as a senior copywriter for a financial technology company. Darkness Does Not Come at Once is his second novel, following A Quiet Genocide, published in 2018. He is a registered carer for his wife, Juliet, who has a spinal cord injury. They live happily in South Oxfordshire. Glenn can be found on social media @glennmbryant.