Excerpt from For the Benefit of Those Who See by Rosemary Mahoney, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Startled, I took the machine in my hands, fumbled with it, accidentally turned it on, turned it off again, confirmed that it was off, and handed it back to her. She said, "Right, then," and stood up and headed for the door with no guidance from the dog, who followed slowly behind her with an air of resigned obedience.

I remember wondering with intense puzzlement how the blind woman knew that I had been sitting there, for I had not moved or spoken or made any sound at all since she came in and sat down next to me. And how was she going to operate the RTÉ switchboard if she didn't know whether her own radio was on or off? Above all, how did she know I was a woman? She had called me madam. Why? With strong feelings of suspicion, mistrust, fascination, and resentment I watched her and the dog disappear through the doorway.

Aside from one fleeting exchange with a blind man over the harness of his guide dog in a very small elevator in Boston, a vacuous little volley of small talk in which neither the blindness nor the conspicuous dog was mentioned, Lisa had been my only real encounter with a blind person before I went to Tibet. Fourteen years later, on my way to Lhasa I felt that my ignorance about blind people could somehow hurt both them and me.

Excerpted from For the Benefit of Those Who See by Rosemary Mahoney. Copyright © 2014 by Rosemary Mahoney. Excerpted by permission of Little Brown & Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.