Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen:
"I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills."
I love this sentence, beautiful, succinct, clear.
In April, after our next book discussion, we begin to vote and select titles for our 2018-2019
book discussion year. Let's take a look at the first sentences in the 9 books from the
current lineup of possibilities for Historical Fiction:
- "At half past six on the twenty-first of June 1922, when Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov was escorted through the gates of the Kremlin onto Red Square, it was glorious and cool." (A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles)
- "On our wedding day I was forty-six, she was eighteen." (Lincoln in the Bardo by George Sanders)
- "I was born with a talent. Not for dance, or comedy, or anything so delightful." (Girl in Translation by Jean Kwok)
- "We have been lost to each other for so long. My Name means nothing to you. My memory is dust." (The Red Tent by Anita Diamant)
- "If I have learned anything in this long life of mine, it is this: In love we find out who we want to be, in war we find out who we are." (The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah)
- "My story begins on a sweltering August night in a place I will never set eyes upon. The room takes place only in my imaginings." (Before We Were Yours by Lisa Wingate)
- "When Irina Bazili began working at Lark House in 2010, she was twenty three years old but already had few illusions about life." (The Japanese Lover by Isabel Allende)
- "Mr. Stelling, " she said...."Couldn't I do Euclid, and all Tom's lessons, if you were to teach me instead of him?" (Impossible Saints by Clarissa Harwood)
- "No coincidence, no story," my a-ma recites, and that seems to settle everything, as it usually does, after First Brother finishes telling us about the dream he had last night. (Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane by Lisa See)