Teaser Tuesday is a weekly bookish meme hosted by MizB of Books and a Beat 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 Books and a Beat.

This week my teaser comes from His Bloody Project by Graeme Macrae Burnet. I spotted this on another blog and also on the GoodReads Choice awards and thought I’d give it a try. It’s not my usual type of read (I’m not a fan of historical fiction) but enjoying it so far.

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My Teaser

Archibald Ross replied that for folk like us there was no other ship than the hard ship. I was greatly impressed with this reply and thought my new friend the cleverest person I had ever met.

~ page 50

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Blurb

A brutal triple murder in a remote northwestern crofting community in 1869 leads to the arrest of a young man by the name of Roderick Macrae. There’s no question that Macrae is guilty, but the police and courts must uncover what drove him to murder the local village constable.

And who were the other two victims? Ultimately, Macrae’s fate hinges on one key question: is he insane?

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Happy reading everyone.

Teaser Tuesday is a weekly bookish meme hosted by MizB of Books and a Beat 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 Books and a Beat.

This week my teaser comes from Faithful by Alice Hoffman. I received this from NetGalley and actually finished it at the weekend but as I loved it so much I really wanted to post a teaser. It’s a beautifully written and emotional read.

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My Teaser

Occasionally a candle will still be burning, so fresh it’s as though it had just been lit. Then the girls gather round in awe and solidarity, even the ones who hate each other. They close their eyes and make a wish, the same one every time: Let it never be me.

~ location 104

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Blurb

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Marriage of Opposites and The Dovekeepers comes a soul-searching story about a young woman struggling to redefine herself and the power of love, family, and fate.

Growing up on Long Island, Shelby Richmond is an ordinary girl until one night an extraordinary tragedy changes her fate. Her best friend’s future is destroyed in an accident, while Shelby walks away with the burden of guilt.

What happens when a life is turned inside out? When love is something so distant it may as well be a star in the sky? Faithful is the story of a survivor, filled with emotion—from dark suffering to true happiness—a moving portrait of a young woman finding her way in the modern world. A fan of Chinese food, dogs, bookstores, and men she should stay away from, Shelby has to fight her way back to her own future. In New York City she finds a circle of lost and found souls—including an angel who’s been watching over her ever since that fateful icy night.

Here is a character you will fall in love with, so believable and real and endearing, that she captures both the ache of loneliness and the joy of finding yourself at last. For anyone who’s ever been a hurt teenager, for every mother of a daughter who has lost her way, Faithful is a roadmap.

Alice Hoffman’s “trademark alchemy” (USA TODAY) and her ability to write about the “delicate balance between the everyday world and the extraordinary” (WBUR) make this an unforgettable story. With beautifully crafted prose, Alice Hoffman spins hope from heartbreak in this profoundly moving novel.

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Happy reading everyone.

Teaser Tuesday is a weekly bookish meme hosted by MizB of Books and a Beat 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 Books and a Beat.

This week my teaser comes from The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery. This is my current real life book club read and I have to admit I’m finding it a bit of a struggle. There’s a lot of philosophy, something I know very little about, so I’m not sure I will actually manage to finish it. As book club is tomorrow lunchtime, and I’m currently on page 65, I’m definitely up against it.

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My Teaser

Thus the concierge couple, as served by the metaphor of their totemic poodle, seems to be utterly devoid of such passions as love and desire and, like their totem, destined to remain ugly, stupid, submissive and boastful. If, in certain novels, princes fall in love with working-class lasses, and princesses with galley slaves, between two concierges, even of the opposite sex, there is never any romance of the type that others experience and that might someday make a worthy story.

~ page 42, The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery

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Blurb

Renée is the concierge of a grand Parisian apartment building, home to members of the great and the good. Over the years she has maintained her carefully constructed persona as someone reliable but totally uncultivated, in keeping, she feels, with society’s expectations of what a concierge should be. But beneath this facade lies the real Renée passionate about culture and the arts, and more knowledgeable in many ways than her employers with their outwardly successful but emotionally void lives.
Down in her lodge, apart from weekly visits by her one friend Manuela, Renée lives resigned to her lonely lot with only her cat for company. Meanwhile, several floors up, twelve-year-old Paloma Josse is determined to avoid the pampered and vacuous future laid out for her, and decides to end her life on her thirteenth birthday. But unknown to them both, the sudden death of one of their privileged neighbours will dramatically alter their lives forever.

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Happy reading everyone.

Teaser Tuesday is a weekly bookish meme hosted by MizB of Books and a Beat 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 Books and a Beat.

This week my teaser comes from Dash and Lily’s Book of Dares by David Levithan and Rachel Cohn which I picked up yesterday after finishing Empire of Storms. Only around 20% in but I’m absolutely loving it. It’s cute and very, very funny (my fellow commuters probably think I’m nuts). It also turns out it that it’s Christmas themed and set in New York so I’m in book heaven.

Anyway the teaser…

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My Teaser

I was horribly bookish, to the point of coming right out and saying it, which I knew was not socially acceptable. I particularly loved the adjective bookish, which I found other people used about as often as ramrod or chum or teetotaler

~ page 3

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Blurb

I’ve left some clues for you. If you want them, turn the page. If you don’t, put the book back on the shelf, please.

At the urge of her lucky-in-love brother, sixteen-year-old Lily has left a red notebook full of dares on her favourite bookshop shelf, waiting for just the right guy to come along and accept. Curious, snarky Dash isn’t one to back down from a challenge – and the Book of Dares is the perfect distraction he’s been looking for.

As they send each other on a scavenger hunt across Manhattan, they’re falling for each other on paper. But finding out if their real selves share their on-page chemistry could be their biggest dare yet….

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Happy reading everyone.

Teaser Tuesday is a weekly bookish meme hosted by MizB of Books and a Beat 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 Books and a Beat.

This week my teaser comes from Ready Player One by Ernest Cline which I’m around halfway through. This is one of those books I feel like I should have read ages ago but I was put off by the fact that it’s science fiction and I don’t always have the best relationship with that genre. Suffice to say the first 70 pages were a real struggle but I’m finding it easier going now. Anyway the teaser…

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My Teaser

OK, on second thought, maybe honesty isn’t the best policy after all. Maybe it isn’t a good idea to tell a newly arrived human being that he’s been born into a world of chaos, pain, and poverty just in time to watch everything fall to pieces.

~ page 18, Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

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Blurb

It’s the year 2044, and the real world is an ugly place.

Like most of humanity, Wade Watts escapes his grim surroundings by spending his waking hours jacked into the OASIS, a sprawling virtual utopia that lets you be anything you want to be, a place where you can live and play and fall in love on any of ten thousand planets.

And like most of humanity, Wade dreams of being the one to discover the ultimate lottery ticket that lies concealed within this virtual world. For somewhere inside this giant networked playground, OASIS creator James Halliday has hidden a series of fiendish puzzles that will yield massive fortune — and remarkable power — to whoever can unlock them.

For years, millions have struggled fruitlessly to attain this prize, knowing only that Halliday’s riddles are based in the pop culture he loved — that of the late twentieth century. And for years, millions have found in this quest another means of escape, retreating into happy, obsessive study of Halliday’s icons. Like many of his contemporaries, Wade is as comfortable debating the finer points of John Hughes’s oeuvre, playing Pac-Man, or reciting Devo lyrics as he is scrounging power to run his OASIS rig.

And then Wade stumbles upon the first puzzle.

Suddenly the whole world is watching, and thousands of competitors join the hunt — among them certain powerful players who are willing to commit very real murder to beat Wade to this prize. Now the only way for Wade to survive and preserve everything he knows is to win. But to do so, he may have to leave behind his oh-so-perfect virtual existence and face up to life — and love — in the real world he’s always been so desperate to escape.

A world at stake.
A quest for the ultimate prize.
Are you ready?

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Happy reading everyone.

Teaser Tuesday is a weekly bookish meme hosted by MizB of Books and a Beat 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 Books and a Beat.

This week my teaser comes from Feminist Fight Club by Jessica Bennett which I finished reading yesterday but felt I really should share a teaser from. I don’t usually read non fiction but this has some fascinating ideas and useful tactics for dealing with sexist behaviour and self sabotaging in the work place.

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My Teaser

Luck: a thing that women give credit to for their success. What men give credit to: skill.

~ location 119, Feminist Fight Club by Jessica Bennett

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Blurb

Part manual, part manifesto, a humorous yet incisive guide to navigating subtle sexism at work—a pocketbook Lean In for theBuzzfeed generation that provides real-life career advice and humorous reinforcement for a new generation of professional women.

It was a fight club—but without the fighting and without the men. Every month, the women would huddle in a friend’s apartment to share sexist job frustrations and trade tips for how best to tackle them. Once upon a time, you might have called them a consciousness-raising group. But the problems of today’s working world are more subtle, less pronounced, harder to identify—and, if Ellen Pao is any indication, harder to prove—than those of their foremothers. These women weren’t just there to vent. They needed battle tactics. And so the fight club was born.

Hard-hitting and entertaining, Feminist Fight Club blends personal stories with research, statistics, infographics, and no-bullsh*t expert advice. Bennett offers a new vocabulary for the sexist workplace archetypes women encounter everyday—such as the Manterrupter who talks over female colleagues in meetings or the Himitator who appropriates their ideas—and provides practical hacks for navigating other gender landmines in today’s working world. With original illustrations, Feminist Mad Libs, a Negotiation Cheat Sheet, as well as fascinating historical research and a kit for “How to Start Your Own Club,”Feminist Fight Club tackles both the external (sexist) and internal (self-sabotaging) behaviors that plague today’s women—as well as the system that perpetuates them.

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Happy reading everyone.