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 Trough 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 - A Voice Trough a Cloud is, as John Updike wrote in The New Yorker, "An incomparable account of shattered flash and refracted spirit." His third and final novel, and written at a point when Welch could write for no more than a few minutes a day, A Voice Trough A Cloud is nonetheless possibly one of the most complete accounts of health and mortality; as Edmund White says, it is a book of "long slow dying", "through which all the world's strangeness can be perceived."
