Have you ever picked up a book and wondered where it had been before, well welcome to the world of bookcrossing!

Bookcrossing is a wonderful place to share your love of reading with people all over the world and follow a book as it continues on its travels.

Please journal this book, describing where you found it, and then if you want to, what you thought of it. You can remain anonymous if you want to, though if you create a screen name you will be able to get notification each time someone else journals this book in the future.

When you have finished with it please release the book by leaving it somewhere where it will be found (please make a journal entry stating where you left it), and let it continue its journey.

Help keep its journey alive!

Following this books travels can be very fun.

Voyage in the Dark is a 1934 novel by Jean Rhys. It tells of the semi-tragic descent of its young protagonist Anna Morgan who is moved from her Caribbean home to England by an 'evil' stepmother. Once she leaves school, and she is cut off financially by the stepmother, Hester, Anna tries to support herself as a chorus girl, then falls in love with a man named Walter who briefly supports her but won't marry her. When he leaves her, she begins a downward spiral.

Like William Faulkner's The Wild Palms, the novel features a botched illegal abortion. Rhys' original version ended with the death of Anna from this abortion (see Bonnie Kime Scott's The Gender of Modernism for the original ending), but she revised it before publication.

The novel is rich in Caribbean folklore and tradition and post-colonial identity politics, including black self-identification by its white protagonist.

Jean Rhys (24 August 1890 – 14 May 1979), born Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams, was a mid 20th-century novelist from Dominica. Educated from the age of 16 in Great Britain, she is best known for her novel Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), written as a "prequel" to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre.

Rhys was born in Roseau, Dominica. Her father, William Rees Williams, was a Welsh doctor and her mother, Minna Williams, was a third-generation Dominican Creole of Scots ancestry.
Rhys was educated at the Convent School and moved to England when she was sixteen, sent there to live with her aunt Clarice. She attended the Perse School for Girls in Cambridge, where she was mocked because of her accent and outsider status. She also spent two terms at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London in 1909. The instructors at RADA despaired of Rhys being able to speak what they considered "proper English" and advised her father to take her away. Unable to train as an actress and refusing to return to the Caribbean as her parents wished, she worked with varied success as a chorus girl.

After her father died in 1910, Rhys drifted into the demimonde. Having fallen in love with a wealthy stockbroker, Lancelot Grey Hugh ("Lancey") Smith (1870–1941), she became his mistress. Although Smith was a bachelor, he did not offer to marry Rhys and their affair ended within two years. He continued to be an occasional source of financial help. Distraught both by the end of the affair and by the experience of a near-fatal abortion (not Smith's child), Rhys began writing an account which became the basis of her novel Voyage In The Dark. In need of money, in 1913 she posed nude for an artist in Britain, probably Dublin-born William Orpen. During World War I, Rhys served as a volunteer worker in a soldiers' canteen. In 1918 she worked in a pension office.

She went on to marry 3 times, and died in Exeter on 14 May 1979 before completing her autobiography.

Bought in a second hand bookshop in the Wye Valley, Wales, this book came with me when I moved from the UK to China and has been sat waiting to be read for a long time.

I am off on holiday to Vietnam tomorrow and intend to take it with me.

Have not had a chance to read it, so will going back to China with me tomorrow.

Read this book during my journey from Hanoi to Wuhun via Guangzhou airport.

Anna is a naive young girl, who wanders from one doomed relationship after another, friends included, yet she does not come across as a victim. While I did find her to be a likable character I did not have much sympathy for her, she appeared fully aware of what she was doing as she lost her innocence. It is written in a realistic rather than romantic way; beautifully written and utterly engrossing. I is not an upbeat novel, though at the same time avoids being depressing.

Being back home in Foshan, I have entered this book into round 5 of the first sentences virtual book box .

So someone will select the book based solely on this first sentence:

It was as if a curtain had fallen, hiding everything I had ever known.

Pposted to veronicay who chose it from the book box.

Picked up via the First Sentence VBB. Thanks bookowl1000! I likke Jean Rhys so I'm looking forward to reading it.