Not only does Gilion host the European Reading and TBR 22 in 22 on her Rose City Reader blog but also Book Beginnings on Friday. While I'm no stranger to her European Reading Challenge, only recently I decided to participate in Book Beginnings on Friday. This week I'm back with another post.
For Book Beginnings on Friday Gilion asks us to simply "share the opening sentence (or so) of the book you are reading this week, or just a book that caught your fancy and you want to highlight."
MY BOOK BEGINNING
Some nights, when the storm came in from the west the house groaned like a boat tossed back and forth on a heavy sea. Gusts of wind squealed before being deadened by the old walls.
That's what witches sound like when they're burning, Vera thought, or children when they get their fingers caught.
Last week I featured the 2016 biography True Believer: Stalin's Last American Spy by Hungarian-American writer Kati Marton. The week before it was the 2021 novel The Wrong End of the Telescope by Lebanese-American writer Rabih Alameddine. This week it's the 2016 novel This House Is Mine by German writer and linguist Dörte Hansen.
This House Is Mine is yet another one of those books I discovered because a helpful librarian recommended it by propping the book upright with its cover prominently displayed. Noticing its lead character is a wartime refugee from former German East Prussia I figured Hansen's novel could make a good follow-up to Svenja O'Donnell's 2020 family memoir Inge's War: A German Woman's Story of Family, Secrets, and Survival Under Hitler. Instead of me blathering on, here's what novel's page on Amazon has to say:
All her life Vera has felt like a stranger in the old and drafty half-timbered farmhouse she arrived at as a five-year-old refugee from East Prussia in 1945, and yet she can't seem to let it go. Sixty years later, her niece Anne suddenly shows up at her door with her small son. Anne has fled the trendy Hamburg, Germany neighborhood she never fit into after her relationship imploded. Vera and Anne are strangers to each other but have much more in common than they think. As the two strong-willed and very different women share the great old house, they find what they have never thought to search for: a family.
No comments:
Post a Comment