Dark-Land: Memoir of a Secret Childhood

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.