Anna was ambitious and worked hard. She'd just bought an apartment and was falling in love. Suddenly, her face felt like it was burning when in front of the computer. This progressed to intolerance of fluorescent light, then of sunlight. Now she must spend months in a blacked-out room, at best venturing cautiously out at dawn and dusk. And then there is Pete. With gorgeous prose, Anna brings us into the dark with her, from which we emerge to see the...

Teenager Viola Li and her sister Roz are selling bean buns at a science fiction gathering in Seattle when she suddenly collapses--she wakes up in the hospital to find that somehow she has developed an extreme case of photosensitivity (so bad that even ordinary lights can cause blisters), and somehow, in her senior year of high school, she has to craft a new life that will still include journalism school, activism, and the new guy who caught her as...