Posted in Weekly Posts

First Chapter ~ First Paragraph (September 22)

First Chapter

Welcome to another Tuesday celebrating bookish events, from Tuesday/First Chapter/Intros, hosted by Bibliophile by the Sea Every Tuesday, Diane at Bibliophile by the Sea posts the opening paragraph (sometime two) of a book she decided to read based on the opening. Feel free to grab the banner and play along.

My opening comes from The Night Watch by Sarah Waters

The Night Watch

Blurb

Moving back through the 1940s, through air raids, blacked out streets, illicit liaisons, sexual adventure, to end with its beginning in 1941, The Night Watch is the work of a truly brilliant and compelling storyteller.
This is the story of four Londoners – three women and a young man with a past, drawn with absolute truth and intimacy. Kay, who drove an ambulance during the war and lived life at full throttle, now dresses in mannish clothes and wanders the streets with a restless hunger, searching . . . Helen, clever, sweet, much-loved, harbours a painful secret . . . Viv, glamour girl, is stubbornly, even foolishly loyal, to her soldier lover . . . Duncan, an apparent innocent, has had his own demons to fight during the war. Their lives, and their secrets connect in sometimes startling ways. War leads to strange alliances . . . Amazon

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First Chapter ~ First Paragraph ~ Intro

So this, said Kay to herself, is the sort of person you’ve become: a person whose clocks and wrist-watches have stopped, and who tells the time, instead by the particular kind of cripple arriving at the landlords door.
For she was standing at her open window, in a collarless shirt and a pair of greyish underpants, smoking a cigarette and watching the coming and going of Mr Leonard’s patients. Punctually, they came — so punctually, she could tell the time by them: the woman with the crooked back, on Mondays at ten; the wounded soldier, on Thursdays at eleven. On Tuesdays at one an elderly man came with a fey-looking boy to help him. Kay enjoyed watching form them. She liked watching for them. She liked to see them making their slow way up the street: the man neat and dark-suited as an undertaker, the boy patient, serious, handsome—like an allegory of youth and age, she thought, as done by Stanley Spencer or some finicky modern painter like that.

This paragraph goes on for some time but hopefully that is enough to give you a taster?

Do you want to know more? Or perhaps you’ve already read this book?

Author:

A book lover who clearly has issues as obsessed with crime despite leading a respectable life

33 thoughts on “First Chapter ~ First Paragraph (September 22)

  1. Oh, this does sound interesting, Cleo! I like the setting very much. What a sense of detail, too! I’ll be interested in what you think of it when you’ve finished it.

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