There was much to enjoy here, but I found I couldn't connect with it. I'd read more from this author in the future though.

Sarah is making a long overdue journey. With her eight-year-old son beside her, she is on a long-haul flight from her home in London, ‘slipping across countries through the shimmering boundaries of time’, heading back to southern New Zealand where she grew up. As she nears her destination, Sarah must tackle memories from her childhood, recollections of a hard, unfair time that, even now, refuses to loosen its claws completely. Emma Timpany’s evocative but bleak novella, part of the Fairlight Moderns series, probes at the way in which we are yoked to our pasts and follows one woman’s efforts to close the circle: ‘Sometimes it’s just a matter of waiting; waiting for history and memory to align, like stars over a mountain, and lead you home.‘


At first, the purpose of Sarah’s journey is unknown, but it gradually becomes clear that she has come back to visit an old friend. As they travel further down into the south of the island, Sarah tries to enthuse her little boy with the legends and landscapes of her native country, trying to offer him a richly enjoyable experience that will contrast with her own bitter memories. Like a journey in a dream, where the travel is the point and not the destination, Sarah’s trip is unexpectedly lengthened by diversions and delays. She and the child wander along beaches, spend time in playgrounds, paddle in lakes and watch penguins waddling out of the surf. In all these things, she finds echoes of her earlier life: her violent father; her spiteful mother and point-scoring sister; her friends, whose relationship squeezed her out. Why return now? What has finally encouraged her to come home, after almost a decade trying to leave her memories behind?

There are passages of raw beauty in Timpany’s prose, moments which encourage you to halt and reread, but on the whole it’s difficult to really engage. She has chosen a distant, rather detached narrative voice, which makes it very hard to empathise with Sarah even though she’s been on the receiving end of so much suffering. The novella gains an abstract quality which leaches Sarah’s story of colour and heft – perhaps deliberately? Are we looking at the world through the eyes of someone still unable to look her past in the eye, or struggling to overcome a distance imposed by trauma? Sarah herself has the preternatural calm of someone who has managed to survive everything the world has thrown at her so far, and has come to expect nothing better:

I have travelled to a place that you cannot buy a ticket to; there is no train that goes there, no boat, no plane; there is no map that you can follow to find it; there is no road. It lies on the other side of that circle of light. It is always dark there, and it is always cold.

It doesn’t make for an upbeat read, but it has affecting moments, burying down into the pit of your stomach and leaving you with a strange, nauseous little feeling. There’s little to relieve a succession of crushing incidents, as Sarah’s memories of childhood misery are compounded by thoughts of her more recent divorce, and distressing tantrums thrown by her erratic child. (I read a review that criticised the characterisation of the child, saying that his behaviour seems like that of a far younger boy. I’m in no position to judge, myself, being unfamiliar with developmental stages, but it seems possible.) You do find yourself thinking: hasn’t this woman suffered enough? And yet Timpany’s story does offer the possibility of future redemption. Sarah has suffered, but she has survived, and she is now strong enough to go back and face what needs to be confronted. Her journey is physical and emotional, spiritual and moral: a slow but determined slog from darkness into compassion. The title is significant, in this respect: Timpany writes in her acknowledgements that it was inspired by an unpublished fragment by the Kiwi poet Robin Hyde: ‘who travels with his dreams travels with a dark torch‘.

I’ll be honest: I don’t think I want to reread this, because its unremitting bleakness is too heavy for my spirits, but I can appreciate elements of its poetry and its strange, hypnotic, lazy flow. It is a hard little story of human cruelty, both the violent physical kind and the equally damaging, emotionally thoughtless kind – but perhaps it offers the possibility of hope; of change; of a new beginning? Strange, lingering, and a little bitter on the tongue.

This review will be published on my blog on 18 April 2020 at the following link:
https://theidlewoman.net/2020/04/16/travelling-in-the-dark-2018-emma-timpany

This novella is set in the scenic landscape of New Zealand and talks about Sarah's journey back home. She comes back home after many years with her little boy and a lot of demons from the past come back to haunt her..
This story is sad, melancholic and extremely beautiful in the way that it describes the stunning landscape of New Zealand. It manages to evoke varied emotions in the few pages that it encompases and there are moments when I felt quite terrible for Sarah. Do pick this up if you want to experience an engaging and evoking read spanning just a few pages..

This is a beautifully written novella with real emotional depth. Although it is short, it's packed with detail and is hugely absorbing.

I really enjoyed it.

This novella was well written with an intriguing and addictive plot. The pacing, for a novella, was also nice and allowed for the story to shine. The overall plot of this novella, Sarah's return to New Zealand stirs up plenty of emotions and feelings being someone who has left their homeplace and has returned later. It's a nice story with a plethora of small lessons and thoughts to remember, as everyone's life has the possibility of being messy and wild.

Thanks to Fairlight Books and NetGalley for the advance reading copy.

I really enjoyed this short novella by Emma Timpany. It was beautifully written, particularly the descriptions of New Zealand and Greece, and thought provoking with central themes about family and love.

The family thread of the story would hit home to anyone who has suffered as a member of a cruel and unfeeling family. The feelings of confusion, obligation and the futility of trying to have a relationship with toxic people who don’t care about you would sadly be familiar to many readers who too have messy and complicated families. There were points when I wanted to shake Sarah and scream “they’re not worth it!” but we can probably all be guilty sometimes of putting in huge efforts to one-sided relationships.

The ‘love story’ (although I hesitate to call it that) will be familiar to those who have experienced a frustrated teen love and anyone whose friend ultimately got the guy. I guess the moral of this part of the story is to not wait too long to tell someone how you feel. Again, the author portrays these relationships in a realistic manner, the people involved aren’t just one dimensional “good” or “bad”, there are nuances just as there are in real relationships.

At the conclusion of the story the future is still uncertain and messy, but I suppose that’s also true to life. Not everything can be comfortably wrapped up in a pretty little bow.

Aspects of the story I didn’t like included Sarah referring to her son throughout the novel as “the child”. It felt very impersonal and uncaring and I don’t feel we got to understand enough of why she chose to do this. I can’t imagine ever referring to my son as “the child” and if it was done for a particular narrative reason, I didn’t get a sense of what that reason may have been. Some of the dialogue between Sarah and “the child” didn’t read as credible to me either. The earthquake references were by the by to me, perhaps this could have been integrated into the story more.

This novella piqued my interest enough to make me want to read more by the author. I enjoyed the simple story and thought it was well written and thought provoking.

Well written, well paced, and with well-developed characters but in the end Sarah never endeared herself to me. New Zealand is well-evoked without the romanticism that usually accompanies non-New-Zealander prose which personally carried me through the novella to the end. However, the ending was so dissatisfying as to cast a pall on the rest of the novella.

Emma Timpany’s novella, Travelling in the Dark, is the slow-moving story of Sarah’s return to New Zealand, where she grew up. She’s on holiday with her young son. The story takes place on the road journey to meet a friend she knew long ago. Interspersed with this present-day trip are Sarah’s memories of childhood.
The writing is beautiful, tempered, following Sarah’s interior and exterior journeys: “When everything else is gone they are all that we have left. Patrick was never a romantic, but even he once admitted to Sarah that the best stories are about love, whether they end happily or not. As she looks at the child, she tries to remember what she felt when he was born. And then she tries to imagine what it would be like not to love him, what it would be like not to love anybody.” The landscape comes alive in sentences such as, “The sand is the colour of a dream, the colour of a new beginning, a colour so rare it seems unnatural. The child picks up handfuls.”

This is my second novella from the collection and I have to sadly admit that they might be not for me. I love the description of New Zealand through Sarah's journey and the stories she told her son. She's been through so much and at the end, after reading all about her past and scars, I'm so proud of her for making this journey. However, never enjoyed children in books and this book is one of them. I also don't like Patrick and don't think he deserved Sarah's devotion. Overall, I think this novella has a great story but just not for me.

On the surface, Travelling in the Dark by Emma Timpany is a story about a young woman named Sarah travelling back to her home in New Zealand for the first time with her son after years of estrangement from family and the end of her rocky marriage. The narrative is engaging, and the author’s choice to alternate the narrative between past and present with each chapter builds the emotional tension, rather than feeling like a gimmick. In a way, the book reads a bit like a travelogue -- the imagery brings New Zealand to life as Sarah sees the places she spent her childhood through the eyes of her young son. But Sarah’s inner struggle takes center stage, and by the time I had finished the novella, I found myself wrought with sadness, empathy, and the need to reread the novella (which I did). Sarah’s story drives home the impact that one’s early life can have on the rest of our decisions and our ability to perceive and navigate the world in adulthood.

I loved that the themes contained in the title (travel and darkness) permeate the entire work -- within every chapter -- and influence how it can be interpreted. It was the title that I couldn’t let go of after finishing Travelling in the Dark.

Clearly Sarah’s life (as is the same for all of us) is a journey. The story alternates between vignettes from her childhood in an often negative and abusive environment and the present day and her struggles to relate to her son and cope with where life has taken her. Sarah is also actually travelling in the book. She leaves New Zealand in search of an escape as a young woman, landing herself first in Greece and then England. As an adult, she travels back to New Zealand, taking the scenic route (sometimes unintentionally) with her son to visit her childhood friend Patrick.

As Sarah physically moves through the book in what ends up being a prolonged round trip, the idea of darkness (along with color and light) stands out to create contrast in her experiences. All of Timpany’s descriptions paint vivid mental pictures, and while Sarah is clearly surrounded by a world in full color, much of her own existence and perception are veiled in darkness. To travel in the dark implies a few themes, all of which I felt carried strongly through the text. The novella even starts with a statement that, more or less, darkness is just beyond Sarah’s window as she flies at night. The absence of light is often contrasted with the colorful descriptions of her surroundings -- from general features within nature to specific eye colors. The overly colorful descriptions juxtapose with the sad and on-edge (even...dark) tone of the novella’s content, which deals with themes of rejection, sadness, and the fact that eventually we all have to return to face the reality of what we have tried to escape.

Darkness encompasses situations that are tragic, and many of Sarah’s own experience qualify as such. She suffers at the hand of quite a few people who she genuinely loves. Darkness also indicates a level of ignorance, which Sarah demonstrated several times in her youth as she misjudged how she fit in with her family, what it meant to have or be a good friend, and whether or not a person could reciprocate love in the same way. As Sarah travels back to New Zealand, much of her ignorance fades or has faded away, yet Timpany does not let us come out of the dark as readers completely, either. We are left to wonder a bit at the end and to consider her story as we continue on our own paths.

Timpany’s mastery of language to create thematic elements, set the tone, and immerse the reader in the text leaves one travelling in the dark right along with Sarah. This story is one that will stick with me for quite a while, and I am happy to have read it.

Sarah is travelling back to New Zealand with her child, pulled back by her memories and the need to confront her past. A past that includes a mother and sister who took every advantage of her, old relationships, and the fear of earthquake.
A novella that takes the reader on a journey alongside Sarah, an evocative journey, capturing the New Zealand landscape alongside emotions and memories. Beautiful and haunting.

This is the second novella I’ve read in the series published by Fairlight Books and it was a delightful discovery. We follow Sarah on a nostalgic journey across the south island of New Zealand, the places she grew up in and fled ten years ago. Recently split from her partner in England, she has returned with her eight-year-old son to visit the man she loved and lost as a teenager. Very short chapters alternate between the present day journey and the events that led up to her departure, including her unhappy relationships with her mother and older sister.

I found this to be a satisfying mix of emotional journey and travelogue. I’ve always thought New Zealand to be rare and beautiful, and the descriptions here confirm that - some lovely images. In a book this short, there are bound to be some aspects that might have been expanded (her time on the archaeological dig in Greece, for example, is sketchy) but the overall emphasis is on Sarah’s return, not her time away, and I was happy with that. Rounding off with a glimmer of hope for the future, could I ask for more? I’m already looking out for a copy of her previous work - a collection of short stories also set in New Zealand.

A stunning novella told in alternating chapters between the past and the present. Understated, intriguing, moving and engrossing.

Travelling in the Dark was a thoughtful read that switched between the past and present as Sarah made her way back to her hometown while trying to deal with the events that had seen her leave it in the first place. I by no means disliked it--the prose was well written and the pacing nicely handled--but somehow it never completely gripped me, and when it ended, I felt like there was more I still wanted to know and see. A nice novella, with some beautiful descriptive passages, but it lacked that hook to keep me captivated. Even so, a solid 3.5 stars.