Top Ten Tuesday: Opening Lines

Welcome to this week's edition of Top Ten Tuesday which is hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl.

That's right! A Top Ten Tuesday two weeks in a row! The theme this week is Opening Lines. Now, I am not the person who remembers opening lines, no matter how cool they are, with the exception of famous lines. In fact, there is only one that I can think of that isn't one of the obvious ones like Tolstoy or Jane Austen.

Given that I can't come up with many off the top of my head, I am going to bring you the opening lines of the books that I am reading at the moment, and then some of my favourite books off of my shelves.

Silent in the Grave by Deanna Raybourn - This is the opening line that I can roughly paraphrase and it is a doozy as an opening to a historical mystery series. It is also an introduction to Nicholas Brisbane.....what a man.

To say that I met Nicholas Brisbane over my husband's dead body is not entirely accurate. Edward, it should be noted, was still twitching upon the floor.

The Railway Girls by Maisie Thomas - This is one of the books that I am reading at the moment. I will have a review of it up on Thursday.

I don't care what war work I do or where I do it - as long as it isn't here.

Palace of Tears by Julian Leatherdale - This is the other book that I am reading at the moment. And by reading I mean have read the first page, but I will be reading more.

The promise of fire was in the air that morning.

The Lost Love Song by Minnie Darke - One of my favourite book this year, so far.  And I really like this as an opening line for this book.

The love song began it's life, not with a fanfare or a crash of cymbals, but instead with a knock  at a door.

Fire Study by Maria V Snyder - This was the last book I finished. It is the third book in the Chronicles of Ixia series which I started many years ago. I read the first two books and then recently reread them, but this was the first time I read this book. I will be reading the next book soon.

"That's pathetic, Yelena," Dax complained. " An all powerful Soulfinder who isn't all powerful. Where's the fun in that?"

The Winter Sea by Susanna Kearsley (also published as Sophia's Secret)- Oh how I love this book. One of very few books that I have reread, and that I would seriously consider rereading again.

It wasn't chance. There wasn't any part of it that happened just by chance.

Into the Wilderness by Sara Donati - The opening line to another long time favourite series. Last year I read the first book in the follow up series to this one and it was again excellent.

Elizabeth Middleton, twenty-nine years old and unmarried, overly educated and excessively rational, knowing right from wrong and fancy from fact, woke in a nest of marten and fox pelts to the sightof an eagle circling overhead, and saw at once that it could not be far to Paradise.

Bitter Greens by Kate Forsyth  - Another book that I love hard. I actually mentioned this one in last weeks post too so clearly it is on my mind at the moment

I had always been a great talker and teller of tales.

The Summer Garden by Paullina Simons - I don't love this book as much as the first two in this trilogy, but I do however love the way that this opening line both sets the scene for the book to come but also reflects one of the major scenes in the first book. So clever. 

Once upon a time, in Stonington, Maine, before sunset, at the end of a hot war and the beginning of a cold one, a young  woman dressed in white, outwardly calm but with trembling hands, sat on a bench by the harbor, eating ice cream.

The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams - I have given you lines from books I am reading, that are favourites, and the best book I have read this year, so I thought I would finish with the opening line from a  a book I want to read

Before the lost word, there was another. It arrived in the Scriptorium in a second-hand envelope, the old address crossed out and Dr Murray, Sunnyside, Oxford, written in its place.

So, do any of those opening lines call to you?