Scams upon scams
- Attfield Dutt
- Mar 20
- 2 min read
We had a remarkable visitor called Ian last week – a very tall, serious man (who turns out as it happens to be a shrewd and inciteful judge of the blurbs on back covers of novels) who came to examine yet another problem with our house, of which there are many… I told you the other day, didn’t I, about the band across my forehead which proclaims “please please please let me give you tons of money to put right something which you have no intention of dealing with because you are about to go out of business…”
Ian was the exception to all that. He was so distressed when warning us about our latest probable scam that he told us not to worry about the actual problem he had come about – “your house won’t fall down if you leave it for a bit,” he said kindly and sensibly. He told us that our generation was known to be far more trusting than younger ones like his, and that we should always have our daughter with us in the room when anyone wants us to part with money because her generation is rightly much more suspicious than ours.
Ian also said in passing that he reads a lot, so of course I gave him a copy of A DISTANT VOICE IN THE DARKNESS. He glanced straight away at the blurb on the back cover and then dipped into a page or two. He said at once “well you’ve got me hooked – I want to read this!”
Why, I wonder? The blurb talks of burnt chicken in a student hostel which leads to a tender, complicated romance over several decades in settings across the world. The mist-covered hills of Wales are mentioned, though I don’t actually remember commenting on the mist – who writes these blurbs, anyway? The bustling markets of Nigeria: yes now Nigeria certainly does come into the novel, because the year I lived in Nigeria with small children was a formative experience early in my life, but the book also goes on to explore Kolkata (my father’s home), Copenhagen (where my mother came from), South Africa, Australia, the Grand Canyon, with a climax in Lesotho when Eleanor gets shot at a roadblock during an armed invasion.
A DISTANT VOICE IN THE DARKNESS is available in paperback for £9.99 and as an ebook for £3.50 – try it, you might get hooked too!
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