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.

Small Wars by Sadie Jones is historical fiction set mainly in Cyprus in the late 1950s where Major Hal Treherne and his wife Clara and their baby daughters are stationed during the ‘enosis’ (union with Greece) uprising. I’ve read about two thirds of it so far and it is good.

The book begins with a Prologue at Sandhurst in July 1946.

An English rain was falling onto the instruments of the band, onto their olive green uniforms and the uniforms of the cadets as they marched. The quiet rain lay in drops on the umbrellas of the families watching, on the men’s felt hats and the women’s gloved hands; it dampened the grey and green countryside around them and put beads of water onto everything.

The Royal Military Academy Sandhurst (RMAS) is where all officers in the British Army are trained to take on the responsibility of leading their soldiers. The main character is Hal Treherne and this opening chapter is about his passing out parade after he completed his basic training as an officer.

Also every Friday there is The Friday 56, hosted by Freda at Freda’s Voice, but she is taking a break and Anne at My Head is Full of Books has taken on hosting duties in her absence. 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 is in Part Two, which is set in Limassol, Cyprus ten years later in 1956 during the Emergency. Hal has been promoted to a major.

‘It was a sharp sudden valley and it wasn’t fanciful to consider it sinister, with the slithering hard stones and earth that went steeply downward. For most of the day it would be in shadow. Hal had seen the gradients on the map, but was still surprised by the extremity of the land and that anyone would choose to build a farm there, so deep.

Description from Amazon UK:

Hal Treherne is a soldier on the brink of a brilliant career. Impatient to see action, his other commitment in life is to his beloved wife, Clara, and when Hal is transferred to Cyprus she and their twin daughters join him. But the island is in the heat of the emergency; the British are defending the colony against Cypriots – schoolboys and armed guerillas alike – battling for union with Greece.

Clara shares Hal’s sense of duty and honour; she knows she must settle down, make the best of things, smile. But action changes Hal, and the atrocities he is drawn into take him not only further from Clara but himself, too; a betrayal that is only the first step down a dark path.

It was longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2010. The Orange Prize for Fiction, now known as the Women’s Prize for Fiction is an annual award that recognizes the best novel written in English by a woman, regardless of nationality.