Bad News

Edward St Aubyn

First Sentence:     Patrick pretended to sleep, hoping the seat next to him would remain empty, but he soon heard a briefcase sliding into the overhead compartment.

Back of the book:

THE SECOND PATRICK MELROSE NOVEL. Twenty-two years old and in the grip of a massive addiction, Patrick Melrose is forced to fly to New York to collect his father’s ashes. Over the course of a weekend, Patrick’s remorseless search for drugs on the avenues of Manhattan, haunted by old acquaintances and insistent inner voices, sends him into a nightmarish spiral. Alone in his room at the Pierre Hotel, he pushes body and mind to the very edge – desperate always to stay one step ahead of his rapidly encroaching past.

Quotes from the book:

The neighbouring lanes bore witness to the usual combination of excess and decay. Enormous battered cars with sloppy engines, and black-windowed limos, swarmed into the city, like flies on their favourite food. Patrick stared at the dented hubcap of an old white station wagon. It had seen so much, he reflected, and remembered nothing, like a slick amnesiac reeling in thousands of images and rejecting them instantly, spinning out its empty life under a paler wider sky.

‘As the telephone rang he wondered again what kept him from suicide. Was it something as contemptible as sentimentality, or hope, or narcissism? No. It was really the desire to know what would happen next, despite the conviction that it was bound to be horrible: the narrative suspense of it all.’

The smell of cocaine assailed him and he felt his nerves stretching like piano wires. The heroin followed in a soft rain of felt hammers playing up his spine and rumbling into his skull.

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Never Mind

Edward St Aubyn

First Sentence:     At half-past seven in the morning, carrying the laundry she had ironed the night before, Yvette came down the drive on her way to the house.

Back of the book:

THE FIRST PATRICK MELROSE NOVEL. At his mother’s family house in the south of France, Patrick Melrose has the run of a magical garden. Bravely imaginative and self-sufficient, five-year-old Patrick encounters the volatile lives of adults with care. His father, David, rules with considered cruelty, and Eleanor, his mother, has retreated into drink. They are expecting guests for dinner. But this afternoon is unlike the chain of summer days before, and the shocking events that precede the guests’ arrival tear Patrick’s world in two.

Quote from the book:

For a moment he was winded by a sense of absurdity and impotence; he felt like a farmer watching a flock of  crows settle complacently on his favourite scarecrow.

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Night Shift

Stephen King

First Sentence:     “Go on,” Cressner said again.

Back of the book:

From the depths of darkness where hideous rats defend their empire, to dizzying heights where a beautiful girl hangs by a hair above a hellish fate, Night Shift will plunge you into the subterranean labyrinth of the most spine-tingling, eerie imaginations of our time.

Quote from the book:  (Story The Ledge)

It was 10:48, but it seemed that I had spent my whole life on those five inches of ledge.

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The Orphan Master’s Son

Adam Johnson

First Sentence:     Citizens, gather ’round your loudspeakers, for we bring important updates!

Back of the book:

Pak Jun Do knows he is special. He knows he must be the son of the master of the orphanage, not some kid dumped by his parents – it was obvious from the way his father singled him out for beatings.

He knows he is special when he is picked as a spy and kidnapper for his country, the glorious Democratic Republic of North Korea.

He knows he must find his true love, Sun Moon, the greatest opera star who ever lived, before it’s too late.

He knows he’s not like the other prisoners in the camp.

He’s going to get out soon.

Definitely.

Quotes from the book:

When Jun Do had cordoned off the pounding in his eyes, and the hot blood in his nose, when he’d stopped the split in his lips and the sting in his ears from coming inside, when he’d blocked his arms and torso and shoulders from feeling, when that was all blocked off, there was only the inside of him, and what he discovered was a little boy in there who was stupidly smiling, who had no idea what was happening to the man outside.

‘Rather, it was a reminder of the forever of us.’

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How To Get Filthy Rich In Rising Asia

Mohsin Hamid

First Sentence:     Look, unless you’re writing one, a self-help book is an oxymoron.

Back of the book:

In this keenly awaited follow-up to his bestselling The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Mohsin Hamid confirms his place as a radically inventive storyteller with his finger on the world’s pulse.

The astonishing and riveting tale of a man’s journey from impoverished rural boy to corporate tycoon, it steals its shape from the business self-help books devoured by youths all over ‘rising Asia’. It follows its nameless hero to the sprawling metropolis where he begins to amass an empire built on the most fluid and increasingly scarce of goods: water. Yet his heart remains set on something else, on the pretty girl whose star rises alongside his, their paths crossing and re-crossing in a love affair sparked and snuffed out again by the forces that careen their fates along.

The hero of the story could be any one of us, hungry for a different life. And ours too could be the fate that awaits him . . .

Quotes from the book:

[...] for even though you are a man in his mid-thirties, you have only recently been introduced to the types of silences that exist in a home with one occupant, and emotionally you stagger about this new reality like a sailor returned to land after decades at sea.

‘You watch one after another of the ubiquitous, hyper-argumentative  talk shows that fill your television, aware that in their fury they make politics a game, diverting public attention rather than focusing it.’

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Pure

Andrew Miller

First Sentence:     A young man, young but not very young, sits in an anteroom somewhere, some wing or other, in the Palace of Versailles.

Back of the book:

Deep in the heart of Paris, its oldest cemetery is, by 1785, overflowing, tainting the very breath of those who live nearby. Into their midst comes Jean-Baptiste Baratte, a young, provincial engineer charged by the king with demolishing it.

At first Baratte sees this as a chance to clear the burden of history, a fitting task for a modern man of reason. But before long, he begins to suspect that the destruction of the cemetery might be a prelude to his own.

Quote from the book:

Below them, the theatre-goers are fighting their way through the doors like scummed water draining out of a sink.

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Secrecy

Rupert Thomson

First Sentence:     He came on a November day, a cold wind blowing, the fields soaked with rain.

Back of the book:

It is Florence, 1691. The Renaissance is long gone, and the city is a dark, repressive place, where everything is forbidden and anything is possible. The Enlightenment may be just around the corner, but knowledge is still the property of the few, and they guard it fiercely. Art, sex and power – these, as always, are the obsessions. Facing serious criminal charges, Gaetano Zummo is forced to flee his native Siracusa at the age of twenty, first to Palermo, then Naples, but always has the feeling that he is being pursued by his past, and that he will never be free of it. Zummo works an artist in wax. He is fascinated by the plague, and makes small wooden cabinets in which he places graphic, tortured models of the dead and dying. But Cosimo III, Tuscany’s penultimate Medici ruler, gives Zummo his most challenging commission yet, and as he tackles it his path entwines with that of the apothecary’s daughter Faustina, whose secret is even more explosive than his. Poignant but paranoid, sensual yet chilling, Secrecy is a novel that buzzes with intrigue and ideas. It is a love story, a murder mystery, a portrait of a famous city in an age of austerity, an exercise in concealment and revelation, but above all it is a trapdoor narrative, one story dropping unexpectedly into another, the ground always slippery, uncertain…

Quote from the book:

But perhaps that’s what happiness is: a suspension of disbelief or a willed ignorance, which, like held breath, cannot be sustained beyond a certain point.

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