“After the funeral the hiatus that tragedy brought takes a different form. The suddenness of the death has gone, irrelevant now. Thaddeus has stood and knelt in the church of St Nicholas, has heard his wife called good, the word he himself gave to a clergyman he has known all his life. People were present in the church who were strangers to him, who afterwards, in the house, introduced themselves as a few of Letitia’s friends from the time before he knew her. ‘And where is Letitia now?’ an undertaker a week ago inquired, confusing Thaddeus, who for a moment wondered if the man knew why he had been summoned. ‘It’s Letitia who has died,’ he said, and answered, when the man explained, that Letitia was in the mortuary, where she’d been taken.”
From ‘Death in Summer’ by William Trevor
Here’s another #FirstPara by William Trevor:-
READING TURGENEV, featured in ‘Two Lives’
… and my review of LAST STORIES
Try one of these #FirstParas & discover a new author:-
‘The Heart is a Lonely Hunter’ by Carson McCullers
‘Astonishing Splashes of Colour’ by Clare Morrall
‘The Crying of Lot 49’ by Thomas Pynchon
And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#Books #FirstPara DEATH IN SUMMER by William Trevor via http://wp.me/p5gEM4-1Vz @SandraDanby
From ‘Couples’ by John Updike 
