Category: First Chapter

First Chapter, First Paragraph

Published on by Margaret3 Comments

First chapterEvery Tuesday Diane at  Bibliophile by the Sea hosts First Chapter First Paragraph Tuesday Intros, sharing the first paragraph or (a few) of a book she’s reading or thinking about reading soon.

This is a book I’ve had for some time and haven’t read yet. It’s The Other Side of the Bridge by Mary Lawson. I bought this book because I’d read and loved Mary Lawson’s book, Crow Lake (link to my post on the book).

The Other Side of the Bridge begins: 

Prologue

There was a summer back when they were kids, when Arthur Dunn was thirteen or fourteen and his brother Jake was eight or nine, when for weeks on end Jake pestered Arthur to play the game he called knives. Jake had a great collection of knives at the time, everything from fancy little Swiss Army jack-knives with dozens of attachments to a big sleek hunting knife with a runnel down one side for blood. It was the hunting knife that was to be used in the game because according to Jake it was the best for throwing.

The only reason I haven’t read it yet is pressure of time  – and lots of other books that I’m dying to read. But should I read this one soon?

This is the blurb on the back cover:

Arthur and Jake are brothers, yet worlds apart. Arthur is older, shy, dutiful, and set to inherit his father’s farm. Jake is younger and reckless, a dangerous man to know. When Laura arrives in their 1939s rural community, an already uneasy relationship is driven to breaking point …

And this is what Penelope Lively wrote about it in the Guardian:

This is a fine book – an enthralling read, both straightforward and wonderfully intricate.

I think I’ll move it up the list of books-to-be-read.

First Chapter First Paragraph

Published on by Margaret8 Comments

First chapterEvery Tuesday Diane at Bibliophile By the Sea hosts First Chapter First Paragraph Tuesday Intros, where she shares the first paragraph or (2) of a book she is reading or thinking about reading soon. Here’s my contribution this week:

This is the opening of The Redemption of Alexander Seaton by Shona MacLean, from the Prologue:

Banff, 26 March 1626, 10 o’clock

The younger of the two whores rifled the man’s pockets with expert fingers. she cursed softly. Nothing.

‘Leave off, then,’ said her sister. The baillie will be here any minute.’

Mary Dawson rolled the man back over onto his face. He groaned, then retched, and she cursed once more as he vomited bile over her foot. ‘Pig’, she said, and kicked him. The wind sent a barrel careering past them down the brae to smash into a wall below. Somewhere a dog took up a demented howling.

What do you think ? — Would you keep reading? I haven’t read much further on, but I will do.

I came across this book whilst reading blogs a few weeks ago and can’t remember which one referred to this author. I was interested firstly because I like historical mysteries,and secondly because this one is set in Banff on the Moray coast where Shona Maclean lives, and where some of my husband’s family came from. It’s a place I’d like to visit one day.

First Chapter, First Paragraphs: The Unquiet Bones

Published on by Margaret7 Comments

Uetred thought he had discovered pig bones. He did not know or care why they were in the cesspit at the base of Bampton Castle Wall.

Then he found the skull. Uetred was a villein, bound to the land of Lord Gilbert, third Baron Talbot, lord of Bampton Castle and had slaughtered many pigs. He knew the difference between human and pig skulls.

I was browsing in the library, when the medieval style script on the spine of this book caught my eye. Taking it from the shelf I was also struck by the dramatic cover, showing a strange wooden or leather artificial foot. When I read the opening paragraphs and flicked through the pages I decided to borrow the book. It seems it’s a good choice because the library assistant said she had enjoyed it as she likes historical crime fiction – so do I. And there are more books in the series.

It’s The Unquiet Bones: the first chronicle of Hugh de Singleton, surgeon by Melvin R Starr.

I was interested in the foot – is it a genuine medieval prosthetic? I discovered that it is actually an Ancient Egyptian prosthetic toe found on a female mummy at Luxor. The big toe is carved from wood and has holes for lacing it to a leather-type casing.

Now, as far as I know, this is nothing to do with The Unquiet Bones, which is set in the English village of Bampton, but I think it’s fascinating. It certainly drew my attention to the book.

First Chapter, First Paragraphs is a weekly event hosted by Diane at Bibliophile By the Sea.

Book Beginnings: Wild Swans by Jung Chang

Published on by Margaret15 Comments

I’m currently reading Wild Swans by Jung Chang.

It begins:

At the age of fifteen my grandmother became the concubine of a warlord general, the police chief of a tenuous national government of China. The year was 1924 and China was in chaos. Much of it, including Manchuria, where my grandmother lived, was ruled by warlords. the liaison was arranged by her father, a police official in the provincial town of Xixian in southwest Manchuria, about a hundred miles north of the Great Wall and 250 miles northeast of Peking.

Wild Swans is a family memoir – the story of three generations of woman in Jung Chang’s family – her grandmother, mother and herself. This is the 2003 edition with an introduction by Jung Chang explaining how she came to write the book. She had always dreamed of being a writer, but growing up in Mao’s China it seemed out of the question, with most writers suffering in endless police persecutions. It was only after she had been allowed to come to Britain in 1978 to study that she had the freedom to write and to write what she wanted.

So far, I’m finding it fascinating, reading about her grandmother, who was one of the last generation of Chinese woman to suffer the practice of binding feet. I knew of this practice, but hadn’t realised just how much the little girls suffered and continued to suffer throughout their lives.

As this book is so long (over 600 pages in a small font) it’s going to take me quite a while to read it. I’l probably write a few posts on my progress.

First Chapter, First Paragraph is hosted by Diane at Bibliophile by the Sea.

Opening Lines: The Distant Hours

Published on by Margaret10 Comments

I  thought I’d read – The Distant Hours by Kate Morton, at least I thought from the title that I had read it. But when I read some reviews of it on LibraryThing  it didn’t sound at all familiar.  Then I couldn’t find the book on my fiction bookshelves and I thought maybe I’d given it away, thinking I’d read it, when I haven’t – panic! Eventually, I found it in a bookcase full of non-fiction – apart from this and a few other novels that I’d put there whilst tidying up one day.

Looking at it it seems ideal for R.I.P.VII – ‘A dilapidated castle, aristocratic twins, a troubled sister and a series of dark secrets cast a whispery spell in Morton’s third book.’ (Quoted on the back cover from Marie Claire)

It begins:

Hush … Can you hear him?

The trees can. They are the first to know that he is coming.

Listen! The trees of the deep, dark wood, shivering and jittering their leaves like papery hulls of beaten silver; the sly wind, snaking through their tops, whispering that it will soon begin.

The trees know, for they are old and have seen it all before.

I can hardly wait to read it, but I have to because I’m only halfway into Death of a Red Heroine by Qiu Xiaolong and that is really good – I have to finish that first!

Diane at Bibliophile By the Sea hosts this weekly meme. The idea is that you post the opening paragraph (sometimes maybe a few ) of a book you decided to read based on the opening paragraph (s).

Opening Lines: A Room Full of Bones

Published on by Margaret9 Comments

First chapterDiane at Bibliophile By the Sea hosts this weekly meme. The idea is that you post the opening paragraph (sometimes maybe a few ) of a book you decided to read based on the opening paragraph (s).

I’d have read A Room Full of Bones anyway as it’s the latest Elly Griffiths’s latest Ruth Galloway Investigation and I’ve read and loved the earlier books, but the opening lines certainly set the scene and make me want to read more:

 The coffin is definitely a health and safety hazard. It fills the entrance hall, impeding the view of the stuffed Auk, a map of King’s Lynn in the 1800s and a rather dirty oil painting of Percival, Lord Smith, the founder of the museum. The coffin’s wooden sides are swollen and rotten and look likely to disgorge their contents in a singularly gruesome manner.

 Elly Griffiths’s website has more information.