“Before the screaming starts, the night silence of the convent is alive with its own particular sounds.”
From ‘Sacred Hearts’ by Sarah Dunant
Try one of these #FirstPara & discover a new author:-
‘A Farewell to Arms’ by Ernest Hemingway
‘Time Will Darken It’ by William Maxwell
‘Nineteen Minutes’ by Jodi Picoult
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#Books #FirstPara SACRED HEARTS by Sarah Dunant http://wp.me/p5gEM4-f0 via @SandraDanby
“I was born twice. First in a wooden room that jutted out over the black water of the Thames, and then again eight years later in the Highway, when the tiger took me in his mouth and everything truly began.”
From ‘Jamrach’s Menagerie’ by Carol Birch
Try one of these #FirstParas & discover a new author:-
‘The Guest Cat’ by Takashi Hiraide
‘Perfume’ by Patrick Suskind
‘The Ghost’ by Robert Harris
Read my review of ORPHANS OF THE CARNIVAL, also by Carol Birch.
And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#Books #FirstPara JAMRACH’S MENAGERIE by Carol Birch http://wp.me/p5gEM4-ea via @SandraDanby
“It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.”
From ‘The Big Sleep’ by Raymond Chandler
Try one of these #FirstParas & discover a new author:-
‘Jack Maggs’ by Peter Carey
‘Animal Farm’ by George Orwell
‘The Secret Agent’ by Joseph Conrad
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#Books #FirstPara THE BIG SLEEP by Raymond Chandler https://wp.me/p5gEM4-8B via @SandraDanby
“James Bond, with two double bourbons inside him, sat in the final departure lounge of Miami Airport and thought about life and death.”
From ‘Goldfinger’ by Ian Fleming
Try one of these #FirstParas & discover a new author:-
‘The Murder Room’ by PD James
‘Half of a Yellow Sun’ by Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche
‘Couples’ by John Updike
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#Books #FirstPara GOLDFINGER by Ian Fleming http://wp.me/p5gEM4-7F via @SandraDanby
“Sophie Amundsen was on her way home from school. She had walked the first part of the way with Joanna. They had been discussing robots. Joanna thought the human brain was like an advanced computer. Sophie was not certain she agreed. Surely a person was more than a piece of hardware?”
From ‘Sophie’s World’ by Jostein Gaarder
Try one of these #FirstParas & discover a new author:-
‘The Heart is a Lonely Hunter’ by Carson McCullers
‘The Sense of an Ending’ by Julian Barnes
‘That They May Face the Rising Sun’ by John McGahern
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#Books #FirstPara SOPHIE’S WORLD by Jostein Gaarder http://wp.me/p5gEM4-4S via @SandraDanby
“I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974. Specialized readers may have come across me in Dr Peter Luce’s study, ‘Gender Identity in 5-Alpha-Reductase Pseudohermaphrodites,’ published in the Journal of Pediatric Endocrinology in 1975. Or maybe you’ve seen my photograph in chapter sixteen of the now sadly outdated ‘Genetics and Heredity.’ That’s me on page 578, standing naked beside a height chart with a black box covering my eyes.” 
From ‘Middlesex’ by Jeffrey Eugenides
Read my review of THE MARRIAGE PLOT, also by Jeffrey Eugenides.
Try one of these #FirstParas & discover a new author:-
‘American Psycho’ by Brett Easton Ellis
‘Astonishing Splashes of Colour’ by Clare Morrall
‘Queen Camilla’ by Sue Townsend
And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#Books #FirstPara MIDDLESEX by Jeffrey Eugenides http://wp.me/p5gEM4-2q via @SandraDanby
SANDRA DANBY'S BOOK REVIEWS 