Category: Friday 56

Book Beginnings on Friday & The Friday 56: The Go-Between by L P Hartley

Published on by Margaret17 Comments

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.

I’m featuring The Go-Between by L P Hartley, one of the latest books I’ve bought. It’s a book I’ve wanted to read for ages.

Book Beginning:

From the Prologue

The past is a different country: they do things differently there.

Chapter 1

The eighth of July was a Sunday and on the following Monday I left West Hatch, the village where we lived near Salisbury, for Brandham Hall. My mother arranged that my Aunt Charlotte, a Londoner, should take me across London. Between bouts of stomach-turning trepidation I looked forward wildly to the visit.

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:

This morning, my first Sunday at Brandham Hall, Marcus did not come down with me. He said he didn’t feel well.

Description from Goodreads:

When one long, hot summer, young Leo is staying with a school-friend at Brandham Hall, he begins to act as a messenger between Ted, the farmer, and Marian, the beautiful young woman up at the hall. He becomes drawn deeper and deeper into their dangerous game of deceit and desire, until his role brings him to a shocking and premature revelation. The haunting story of a young boy’s awakening into the secrets of the adult world, The Go-Between is also an unforgettable evocation of the boundaries of Edwardian society. It was adapted into an internationally-successful film starring Julie Christie and Alan Bates.

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What do you think, does it appeal to you? What are you currently reading?

Book Beginnings on Friday & The Friday 56: The Cut by Christopher Brookmyre

Published on by Margaret2 Comments

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.

I’m featuring The Cut by Christopher Brookmyre, a book I’ve read recently and have yet to review.

Book Beginning – from the Prologue:

Jerry crouched alongside Millicent’s bed and checked again for a pulse. There was nothing.

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:

He kept his head down as the others filed past. He clocked a few eyes on his T-shirt, a Machine Head one today. Metal tees worked like an invisibility cloak: people had a cursory glance and then knew not to pay you any further attention. Phillipa seemed to hover longer than anyone else, but he kept his eyes to the carpet.

Description from Goodreads:

Millie Spark can kill anyone.

A special effects make-up artist, her talent is to create realistic scenes of bloody violence.

Then, one day, she wakes to find her lover dead in her bed.

Twenty-five years later, her sentence for murder served, Millicent is ready to give up on her broken life – until she meets troubled film student and reluctant petty thief Jerry.

Together, they begin to discover that all was not what it seemed on that fateful night . . . and someone doesn’t want them to find out why.

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What do you think, does it appeal to you? What are you currently reading?

Book Beginnings on Friday & The Friday 56: The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood

Published on by Margaret5 Comments

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.

I’m featuring The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood this week. It’s the second in the Maccadam trilogy. According to Wikipedia this book focuses on a religious sect called the God’s Gardeners, a small community of survivors of the same biological catastrophe depicted in Atwood’s earlier novel Oryx and Crake, which I read soon after it was first published in 2003. 

In the early morning Toby climbs up to the top of the rooftop to watch the sunrise. She uses a mop handle for balance: the elevator stopped working some time ago and the back stairs are slick with damp, and if she slips and topples there won’t be anyone to pick her up.

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:

‘Get rid of that scalped look. We Gardener women all wear our hair long’. When Toby asked why, she was given to understand that the aesthetic preference was God’s.

Description from Goodreads:

The sun brightens in the east, reddening the blue-grey haze that marks the distant ocean. The vultures roosting on the hydro poles fan out their wings to dry them. The air smells faintly of burning. The waterless flood – a manmade plague – has ended the world.

But two young women have survived: Ren, a young dancer trapped where she worked, in an upmarket sex club (the cleanest dirty girls in town); and Toby, who watches and waits from her rooftop garden.

Is anyone else out there?

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What do you think, does it appeal to you? What are you currently reading?

Book Beginnings on Friday & The Friday 56: The Man With No Face by Peter May

Published on by Margaret6 Comments

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.

I’m featuring another book by Peter May this week – The Man With No Face. This was first published in 1981. He made ‘some very minor changes’, before it was republished in 2018.

Kale watched the train through the rain-spattered glass and thought, this time will be the last. But even as the thought formed in his mind it clotted and he knew he would kill again.

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 took their first sips in silence before Bannerman said, ‘Tell me about yourself.’

‘There’s not much to tell.

‘Now why do people always say that?

‘Maybe because it’s true.’

He shook his head. ‘No. Everyone’s got a story to tell.’

Description from Goodreads:

A POWERFUL AND PRESCIENT THRILLER FROM THE MILLION-SELLING AUTHOR OF I’LL KEEP YOU SAFE, COFFIN ROAD AND THE BLACKHOUSE.

A REPORTER WITH NO FEAR

Jaded Edinburgh journalist Neil Bannerman is sent to Brussels, intent on digging up dirt. Yet it is danger he discovers, when two British men are found murdered.

A CHILD WITH NO FATHER

One victim is a journalist, the other a Cabinet Minister: the double-assassination witnessed by the former’s autistic daughter. This girl recalls every detail about her father’s killer – except for one.

THE MAN WITH NO FACE

With the city rocked by the tragedy, Bannerman is compelled to follow his instincts. He is now fighting to expose a murderous conspiracy, protect a helpless child, and unmask a remorseless killer.

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What do you think, does it appeal to you? What are you currently reading?

Book Beginnings on Friday and The Friday 56: A Winter Grave by Peter May

Published on by Margaret14 Comments

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.

A Winter Grave is the last book I bought and is Peter May’s latest novel. I’ve enjoyed the other books of his I’ve read, so I’m hoping this one will be just as good. It is cli-fi, about the effects of climate change on human society, set in 2051.

Cli-fi, short for climate fiction, is  a form of fiction literature that features a changed or changing climate. It is rooted in science fiction, but also draws on realism and the supernatural.


Little will heighten your sense of mortality more than a confrontation with death. But right now such an encounter is the furthest thing from Addie’s mind, and so she is unprepared for what is to come.

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:

In the early photos, when Addie was just a baby, Mel had been happy and radiant, and he lingered over them. But the increasingly haunted face she presented to the world in later years made him scroll more quickly by.

Description from Amazon:

A TOMB OF ICE

A young meteorologist checking a mountain top weather station in Kinlochleven discovers the body of a missing man entombed in ice.

A DYING DETECTIVE

Cameron Brodie, a Glasgow detective, sets out on a hazardous journey to the isolated and ice-bound village. He has his own reasons for wanting to investigate a murder case so far from his beat.

AN AGONIZING RECKONING

Brodie must face up to the ghosts of his past and to a killer determined to bury forever the chilling secret that his investigation threatens to expose.

Set against a backdrop of a frighteningly plausible near-future, A WINTER GRAVE is Peter May at his page-turning, passionate and provocative best.

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What do you think, does it appeal to you? What are you currently reading?

Book Beginnings & The Friday 56: In The Heart of the Sea by Nathaniel Philbrick

Published on by Margaret11 Comments

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.

One of the books I think I’ll read soon is In the Heart of the Sea The Epic True Story That Inspired Moby Dick by Nathaniel Philbrick. I haven’t read Moby Dick. I think it might be easier to read than Moby Dick – at 238 pages it is certainly shorter. It has lots of 5 and 4 star ratings on Goodreads.


Preface February 23, 1821

Like a giant bird of prey, the whaleship moved lazily up the western coast of South America, zigging and zagging across a sea of oil. for this was the Pacific Ocean in 1821, a vast field of warm-blooded oil deposits known as sperm whales.

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:

Before cutting loose the whale’s mutilated corpse, the mates probed its intestinal tract with a lance searching for an opaque, ash-colored substance called ambergris. Thought to be the result of indigestion or constipation on the part of the whale, ambergris is a fatty substance used to make perfume and was worth more than its weight in gold.

Description from Goodreads:

In the Heart of the Sea brings to new life the incredible story of the wreck of the whaleship Essex – an event as mythic in its own century as the Titanic disaster in ours, and the inspiration for the climax of Moby-Dick. In a harrowing page-turner, Nathaniel Philbrick restores this epic story to its rightful place in American history.

In 1820, the 240-ton Essex set sail from Nantucket on a routine voyage for whales. Fifteen months later, in the farthest reaches of the South Pacific, it was repeatedly rammed and sunk by an eighty-ton bull sperm whale. Its twenty-man crew, fearing cannibals on the islands to the west, made for the 3,000-mile-distant coast of South America in three tiny boats. During ninety days at sea under horrendous conditions, the survivors clung to life as one by one, they succumbed to hunger, thirst, disease, and fear.

Philbrick interweaves his account of this extraordinary ordeal of ordinary men with a wealth of whale lore and with a brilliantly detailed portrait of the lost, unique community of Nantucket whalers. Impeccably researched and beautifully told, the book delivers the ultimate portrait of man against nature, drawing on a remarkable range of archival and modern sources, including a long-lost account by the ship’s cabin boy.

At once a literary companion and a page-turner that speaks to the same issues of class, race, and man’s relationship to nature that permeate the works of Melville, In the Heart of the Sea will endure as a vital work of American history.

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What do you think, does it appeal to you? What are you currently reading?