Guess the opening lines...

[kinkytoes]

Hi all, hope it's ok to start this here.

Thought it might be fun and stretch the old grey matter a bit.

I'll attach a shot of some opening lines and whoever guesses correctly post their own?

We could all just post pics but then we might lose track. I don't mind.

Let me know what you think (of the idea, and the opening lines here - hopefully started off with an easyish one but let me know if any clues are needed!)

If it's being done elsewhere please someone direct me 😊

yes Mayor of Casterbridge. Elizabeth Jane is not your Elizabeth Jane aarrgrgh

Did that one and FFTMC at school. I always wondered how it never came out that Elizabeth Jane was younger than she was supposed to be. Didn't she ever have to give her age or date of birth?

Was put off Hardy forever when I read about Jude the Obscure.

When the girl came rushing up the steps, I decided she was wearing far too many clothes.
It was late summer. Rome frizzled like a pancake on a griddleplate. People unlaced their shoes but had to keep them on; not even an elephant could cross the streets unshod. People flopped on stools in shadowed doorways bare knees apart, naked to the waist – and in the backstreets of the Aventine Sector where I lived, that was just the women.

First Falco novel, which I think is The Silver Pigs.

It is. As a Wessex girl myself I have a real soft spot for Thomas Hardy.

All day it has been windy-strange weather for late July-the wind swirling through the hedges like an invisible flood-tide among seaweed; tugging, compelling them in its own direction, dragging them one way until the patches of elder and privet sagged outward from the tougher stretches of blackthorn on either side. It ripped the purple clematis from its trellis and whirled away twigs and green leaves from the oaks at the bottom of the shrubbery.

John Boyne .. hearts invisible furies. Brilliant book.

First Falco novel, which I think is The Silver Pigs.

Yes it is The Silver Pigs.

Mention of the Aventine is the clue for anyone who has read them.

Once on a dark winter's day, when the yellow fog hung so thick and heavy in the streets of London that the lamps were lighted and the shop windows blazed with gas as they do at night, an odd-looking little girl sat in a cab with her father and was driven rather slowly through the big thoroughfares.
She sat with her feet tucked under her, and leaned against her father, who held her in his arm, as she stared out of the window at the passing people with a queer old-fashioned thoughtfulness in her big eyes.

A Little Princess

Yes! I wanted to do The Secret Garden but the heroine’s name is mentioned in the first para so too obvious.

Can we do poems as well?

I wanted to do The Secret Garden but the heroine’s name is mentioned in the first para so too obvious.

Yes I rejected Secret Garden for the same reason. Also Ballet Shoes.

The first day of term has a flavour that is all its own; a whiff of lazy days behind and a foretaste of the busy future. The essential thing, for a village schoolmistress on such a day, is to get up early.

My guess would be Village School.

Miss Read, anyway,

I get the impression lots of us enjoy the same comfort reads.

I was set down from the carrier’s cart at the age of three; and there with a sense of bewilderment and terror my life in the village began. The June grass, amongst which I stood, was taller than I was, and I wept. I had never been so close to grass before. It towered above me and all around me, each blade tattooed with tiger-skins of sunlight. It was knife-edged, dark, and a wicked green, thick as a forest and alive with grasshoppers that chirped and chattered and leapt through the air like monkeys.

My guess would be Village School.

Yes Village School. Must put on my re-read list; it's a long time since I read the Fairacre books.

The last time I saw Russell and Corinne together was the weekend of the final softball game between the addicts and the depressives.

Cider With Rosie

@tothesea yes!

I’m inordinately pleased I knew it!

UNEARTHLY humps of land curved into the darkening sky like the backs of browsing pigs, like the rumps of elephants. At night when the stars rose over them they looked like a starlit herd of divine pigs. The villagers called them Hullocks.

This was one of my favourite books as a child but I haven’t known that many others who’ve read it.

National Velvet ?

PollyHemlock yes! IMPRESSED.
I haven’t seen or heard of that book for decades. I tried it on my DD when she was a horse mad 10 year old but it wasn’t for her.

I enjoyed it when I read it despite not being at all into horses. The characters are so well drawn.