First Chapter ~ First Paragraph (January 3)

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 this week comes from Relativity by Antonia Hayes which will be published in paperback on 17 January 2017.

Blurb

“Help,” he said. “He’s not breathing.”
A tiny baby is rushed to hospital. Doctors suspect he was shaken by his father, who is later charged and convicted. The baby grows up in the care of his mother. Life goes on.
Twelve years later, Ethan is a singular young boy. Gifted with an innate affinity for physics and astronomy, Ethan sees the world in ways others simply can’t – through a prism of light, time, stars and space.
Ethan is the centre of his mother’s universe. Claire has tried to protect him from finding out what happened when he was a baby. But the older Ethan gets, the more questions he asks about his absent father.
A single handwritten letter is all it takes to set off a dramatic chain of events, pulling both parents back together again into Ethan’s orbit. As the years seem to warp and bend, the past is both relived and revealed anew for each of them. Amazon

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First Chapter ~ First Paragraph ~ Intro

1
MOTION

Before you hear any words, you can hear the panic.
It surfaces in an irregularity of breath, a strain of the vocal chords, a cry, a gasp. Panic exists on a frequency entirely its own. Air into air, particle by particle, panic vibrates through the elastic atmosphere faster than the speed of sound. It’s the most sudden and terrible thing, piercing the calm and propelling us towards the worst places. Before the words come out the anxiety is there, roaring on the other side of silence. Before your brain can register what you’re being told, you know something is wrong. And before you can respond it’s already too late. Because once you’ve heard those words, an event is set in motion and everything will change.
‘Help,’ he said, ‘He’s not breathing.’

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Powerful stuff, but would you keep reading?