A Voice Through a Cloud

At the age of twenty, the novelist Denton Welch suffered a cycling accident that left him partially paralyzed; the injuries that he sustained were to leave him in almost constant pain for the rest of his life, as well as bestowing upon him the spinal tuberculosis that would kill him at the age of 33. A Voice Through a Cloud--increasingly regarded as Welch's masterpiece--is his account of this accident and the period of convalescence soon after. The unsparing chronicle of the world of a hospital patient--riddled with anger, boredom, almost unbearable stabs of pain and sharp flashes of humour