Teaser Tuesday is a weekly bookish meme hosted by The Purple Booker. If you want to join in grab your current read, flick to a random page, select two sentences (without spoilers) and share them in a blog post or in the comments of The Purple Booker.
I am shamelessly stealing this from Ali’s blog iwuvbooks because – bluntly – I am looking for regular blogging ideas that involve low effort and high frequency. Hang on, those seem to be the buzz words at work at the moment: *horrified face!
Anyway, this is a teaser for Ruta Sepetys’ The Fountains of Silence, an ARC I have received from NetGalley. Sepetys is the writer of fabulous historical novels Between Shades of Gray and Salt to the Sea and is one of those authors who appears in Young Adult lists and the Carnegie Medal but is just a wonderful writer.
The opening lines were wonderful so this is my teaser:
They stand in line for blood.
June’s early sun blooms across a string of women waiting patiently at el matadero. Fans snap open and flutter, replying to Madrid’s warmth and the scent of open flesh wafting from the slaughterhouse.
The blood will be used for marcilla, blood sausage. It must be measured with care. Too much blood and the sausage is not firm. Too little and the sausage crumbles like dry earth.
Set in Franco’s Spain of the 1950s, just those few sentences conjure the scents, heat and oppression of the times.
The Amazon blurb reads:
Madrid, 1957. Tourists and foreign businessmen flood into Spain under the welcoming guise of sunshine and wine while Spanish citizens are gripped by a dark secret.
Daniel Matheson, the son of an oil tycoon, hopes to connect with the country of his mother’s birth through the lens of his camera. Photography -and fate – introduce him to Ana, a hotel maid, whose family is suffering under the fascist dictatorship of General Franco.
Daniel and Ana’s lives and hearts collide as they unite to uncover the hidden darkness within the city – a darkness that could engulf them all. . .
Master storyteller Ruta Sepetys once again shines light into one of history’s darkest corners in this epic, heart-wrenching novel about identity, unforgettable love and the hidden violence of silence.
Publisher: Penguin
Date: 3rd October 2019
Available: Amazon
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