“A woman, not yet fifty-seven, slight and seeming frail, eats carefully at a table in a corner. Her slices of buttered bread have been halved for her, her fried egg mashed, her bacon cut. ‘Well, this is happiness!’ she murmurs aloud, but none of the other women in the dining room replies because none of them is near enough to hear. She’s privileged, the others say, being permitted to occupy on her own the bare-topped table in the corner. She has her own salt and pepper.”
‘Reading Turgenev’ from ‘Two Lives’ by William Trevor
Amazon

Try one of these 1st paras & discover a new author:-
‘The Children Act’ by Ian McEwan
‘Pride and Prejudice’ by Jane Austen
‘Dance Dance Dance’ by Haruki Murakami

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TWO LIVES by William Trevor #books via @SandraDanby http://wp.me/p5gEM4-2qN