Kevin Hart

Dark-Land: Memoir of a Secret Childhood is Kevin Hart's searing and at times hilarious narrative of his first thirteen years. It is a story of survival and transformation, of deception and recovery. It passes from a frightening childhood in the East-End of London to the disorientation of life in sub-tropical Australia. Throughout, Hart draws on John Bunyan's evocation of "Dark-Land" in his Pilgrim's Progress, the place Valiant-for-Truth leaves in order to seek the Celestial City. But Dark-Land is no allegory. We see Hart's hidden inner life, his family's penchant for keeping secrets about their past, and their illusions about the nature of that shared past. We see Hart pass from being a backward boy, the despair of his teachers in a rough primary school, to experiencing a strange "conversion" in a math class in Brisbane, Australia, which turned him into a Christian, a poet, and an academic. Written in elegant, lucid prose, without a trace of sentimentality, Dark-Land is a memoir of a working-class childhood, a narrative of a migrant, and the story of a convert to Christianity.

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