Category: Book Beginnings on Friday

Book Beginnings …

Published on by Margaret8 Comments

I’m currently reading  Ian McEwan’s latest book, Sweet Tooth. At the moment I’m still quite near the beginning of the book.

It didn’t take me long to decide that I wanted to read Sweet Tooth. I like Ian McEwan’s books, although I wasn’t that keen on his previous book, Solar, but this one looked good when I picked it up from one of the display tables in a local bookshop. Set in 1972, it’s about Serena Frome, the daughter of an Anglican bishop, who is a compulsive reader of novels. She works for MI5 in a very junior position, until she is assigned to a ‘special mission’ called ‘Sweet Tooth’, which brings her into the literary world of a promising young writer.

I’m hoping it’s going to be as good as Atonement, one of my favourite books.  Like Atonement, Sweet Tooth is both a love story and a book about writing.

It begins:

My name is Serena Frome (rhymes with plume) and almost forty years ago I was sent on a secret mission for the British security service. I didn’t return safely. Within eighteen months of joining I was sacked, having disgraced myself and ruined my lover, though he certainly had a hand in his own undoing. (page 1)

For more Book Beginnings on Friday see Gilion’s blog Rose City Reader.

Book Beginnings: Before the Fact

Published on by Margaret12 Comments

I went to Barter Books yesterday and came home with several crime fiction books, plus a book on painting with pastels and a book on Northumberland’s coastal castles.

The book I’m writing about today is one of the crime fiction books, that I was quite excited to find, because I’ve never read anything by Francis Iles, the pseudonym of Anthony Berkeley Cox (1893-1970), a journalist and mystery writer from the Golden Age of crime fiction.

The book is his second novel written as Francis Iles, Before the Fact and it is a psychological study of a potential murderer as seen through the eyes of his intended victim. It begins:

Some women give birth to murderers, some go to bed with them, and some marry them. Lina Aygarth had lived with her husband for nearly eight years before she realized that she was married to a murderer.

I’m eager to read on …

For more Book Beginnings on Friday see Gilion’s blog Rose City Reader.

Book Beginnings: The Glass Guardian

Published on by Margaret7 Comments

Linda Gillard’s latest book The Glass Guardian came out on Kindle on 1 June. It begins:

When I was a child I nearly drowned. In a pond. Nothing dramatic, apart from the fact that I nearly died. I fell into a big pool at my Aunt Janet’s house on the Isle of Skye.

I fell from a wooden bridge over the pool. At least I think I fell. I don’t remember falling. All I remember is drowning – almost drowning – and then I remember being very cold and so sick, I thought I must have vomited up my insides.

I’ve read and loved Linda’s previous books and I have high hopes that this one will be no exception. It’s described as a ‘supernatural love story‘. When Ruth prepares to put her Aunt’s old house up for sale, she’s astonished to find she’s not the only occupant. Worse, she suspects she might be falling in love again.

With a man who died almost a hundred years ago…

Edited 9 June with the following information from Linda:

TGG originally began with Ch 1. The Prologue was one of the last parts of the book to be written. I started writing TGG pre-Kindle, but when I got one myself & downloaded & read many samples without buying the whole book, I realised the importance of grabbing the reader on p.1. So I decided to insert a Prologue which I hoped would keep readers’ thumbs clicking.

Thanks, Linda – I think it’s a dramatic opening that certainly did grab my attention and makes me want to find out more.

For more Book Beginnings on Friday see Gilion’s blog Rose City Reader.

Book Beginnings: Run by Ann Patchett

Published on by Margaret6 Comments

Way back in 2008 I read The Magician’s Assistant by Ann Patchett and because I enjoyed it I wanted to read more of her books. The Magician’s Assistant is about families with strongly drawn characters and from the opening of Run it looks as though it too has family as its theme.

Bernadette had been dead two weeks when her sisters showed up in Doyle’s living room asking for the statue back. They had no legal claim to it, of course, she would never have thought of leaving it to them, but the statue had been in their family for four generations, passing down the maternal line from mother to daughter, and it was their intention to hold with tradition. Bernadette had no daughters.

Further down the opening page it seems that Bernadette had an uncanny resemblance to the statue, which looked like her, ‘as if she had modeled in a blue robe with a halo stuck to the back of her head.’ The opening leads me into the story, making me want to read on.

Ann Patchett’s latest novel State of Wonder is shortlisted for this year’s Orange Prize for Fiction – the winner will be announced on 30 May. Her novel Bel Canto was the 2002 Orange Prize winner.

For more Book Beginnings on Friday see Gilion’s blog Rose City Reader.

 

Book Beginnings

Published on by Margaret16 Comments

Some books sit unread on my bookshelves for quite a long time before I read them. Then when I do pick them up I wonder why on earth I’ve left them so long – they look so good.

The Meaning of Night by Michael Cox is one of these many unread books of mine. I am shocked to see from my LibraryThing catalogue that I’ve had this book since August 2007, not long after I started writing this blog – no doubt I’d read about it on another book blog.

It begins:

After killing the red-haired man, I took myself off to Quinn’s for an oyster supper.

It had been surprisingly – almost laughably – easy.

The first chapter is called Exordium and a footnote explains that this means ‘an introduction to a treatise or discourse’. A second footnote tells me that ‘Quinn’s’ is a shell fishmonger and supper house at 40, Haymarket. So, not only is this a dramatic opening the first few lines tell me this is an historical murder mystery set in London, most likely to be in the Victorian period, all of which makes me want to read on.

Reading the back cover it seems that this book is following on in the tradition of Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens, described as a ‘tale of obsession, love and revenge, played out amid London’s swirling smog’, an ‘extraordinary story of Edward Glyver, book lover, scholar and murderer.’

I think one of the reasons I haven’t read it before now is that not only is it nearly 600 pages long, my copy is printed in a small font!

Book Beginnings ButtonSee more Book Beginnings on Friday at Gilion’s blog Rose City Reader.

 

Book Beginnings: Ninepins by Rosy Thornton

Published on by Margaret3 Comments

I’m a fan of Rosy Thornton’s books and so I’m pleased she has a new book Ninepins due out in a few days. Rosy has kindly set me a copy and I’ve just started to read it – it promises to be just as good as her earlier books. See my reviews of The Tapestry of Love, (my post here) and Hearts and Minds, (my post here).

Ninepins is an old tollhouse, deep in the Cambridgeshire fens where single mother Laura lives with her 12 year old daughter, Beth. She rents out the pumphouse, once a fen drainage station, to students but this time she is persuaded to let it to Willow, a seventeen-year-old care leaver with a mysterious past, by Vince Willow’s social worker. But, is Willow dangerous or vulnerable, or maybe a little of both? And what effect will this have on Beth, already causing her mother concern?

Ninepins begins:

Half past two: she was certain she’d said half past two. Oh dear – why was there already a car in front of the house when it was only 2:17?

From the back cover:

With the tension of a thriller, Ninepins, explores the idea of family, and the volatile and changing relationships between mothers and daughter, in a landscape that is beautiful but – as they all discover – perilous.

Book Beginnings on Friday is hosted by Gilion at Rose City Reader.