First Lines Fridays is a weekly feature for book lovers hosted by Wandering Words. What if instead of judging a book by its cover, its author or its prestige, we judged it by its opening lines?
- Pick a book off your shelf (it could be your current read or on your TBR) and open to the first page
- Copy the first few lines, but don’t give anything else about the book away just yet – you need to hook the reader first
- Finally… reveal the book
Lines
January 1931
Adele had a stitch from running by the time she reached Euston Road. She was late for collecting Pamela, her eight-year-old sister, from her piano lesson on the other side of the busy main road. Aside from the darkness and the usual six o’clock heavy traffic, crossing the road was made even more hazardous by the lumps of blackened ice in the gutters from a fall of snow a few days previously.
Adele Talbot was twelve – small, thin, pale-faced and waif-like in a worn adult tweed coat many sizes too large for her, woollen socks fallen to her ankles and a knitted pixie hood covering her straggly brown hair. Yet despite her still tender years, there was an adult expression of anxiety in her wide, greenish-brown eyes as she hopped from foot to foot impatiently watching for a break in the traffic.
And The Book Is..
by Lesley Pearse
Alex
