Every Friday Book Beginnings on Friday is hosted by Gillion at Rose City Reader where you can share the first sentence (or so) of the book you are reading. You can also share from a book you want to highlight just because it caught your fancy.

This week I’m featuring Earth and Heaven by Sue Gee. This is one of my TBRs I bought several years ago because I’d read one of her other books, The Hours of the Night, pre-blog, when I just noted that it was ‘good overall’ and ‘could be shorter’. But the blurb about this one interested me.

The Book Begins:

When Walter painted his family at evening, a towering angel stood at the door with folded wings.

Also every Friday there is The Friday 56, hosted by Freda at Freda’s Voice, where you grab a book and turn to page 56 (or 56% of an eBook), find one or more interesting sentences (no spoilers), and post them.

Page 56:

They climbed the stairs to the class and took their places. Walter was working from a bust now. After weeks of limbs and torsos it felt both liberating and strange to spend his time studying a human face, a female face: to measure the proportions of hairline to brow, and brow to cheekbone; to draw the sweet and subtle curve of the lips.

Blurb from the back cover:

In the aftermath of the First World War, the young painter Walter Cox and the wood-engraver Sarah Lewis meet at the Slade, then set up home and a studio together. With their newfound happiness, and the birth of Meredith, then Geoffrey, the grief of war recedes. But children are unpredictable and have their own inner lives: events on a summer afternoon change everything …

Deeply affecting, shot through with a shimmering apprehension of the natural world, Earth and Heaven is about life’s fragility, and the power of love and painting to disturb, renew and reveal us to ourselves.

What do you think? Does it interest you too?