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.

This week my teaser comes from The Places I’ve Cried in Public by Holly Bourne. I picked this up Saturday morning and had it finished by that evening, it was just so good. It’s not an easy read, it’s about an unhealthy relationship, but it’s incredibly well done. Bourne is fast becoming one of my favourite writers.

My Teaser

Love hurts. That’s what they always say, isn’t it? Is it real if it’s not hurting. Can you trust it’s love if it doesn’t punch you in the face?

The Places I’ve Cried In Public by Holly Bourne

Blurb

Amelie loved Reese. And she thought he loved her. But she’s starting to realise love isn’t supposed to hurt like this. So now she’s retracing their story and untangling what happened by revisiting all the places he made her cry.

Because if she works out what went wrong, perhaps she can finally learn to get over him.

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.

This week my teaser comes from Queen of Nothing by Holly Black, the third and final book in the Folk of the Air trilogy. I was trying this month to stick to galleys but when I spied this in the bookshop I couldn’t resist and started it pretty much immediately. As this is the third book I’ll add a warning here that while I’ve chosen the spoiler free teaser there are mild spoilers in the blurb below.

My Teaser

Maybe she wanted to play the great game. Maybe she thought of all the things he could do for her if he were sitting on the throne.

Pg44 Queen of Nothing by Holly Black

Blurb

He will be destruction of the crown and the ruination of the throne.

Power is much easier to acquire than it is to hold onto. Jude learned this lesson when she released her control over the wicked king, Cardan, in exchange for immeasurable power.

Now as the exiled mortal Queen of Faerie, Jude is powerless and left reeling from Cardan’s betrayal. She bides her time determined to reclaim everything he took from her. Opportunity arrives in the form of her deceptive twin sister, Taryn, whose mortal life is in peril.

Jude must risk venturing back into the treacherous Faerie Court, and confront her lingering feelings for Cardan, if she wishes to save her sister. But Elfhame is not as she left it. War is brewing. As Jude slips deep within enemy lines she becomes ensnared in the conflict’s bloody politics.

And, when a dormant yet powerful curse is unleashed, panic spreads throughout the land, forcing her to choose between her ambition and her humanity…

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.

This week my teaser comes from Joe Hill’s short story collection Full Throttle, or if I’m being more accurate from the introduction to Joe Hill’s short story collection where he talks a bit about becoming a writer and his famous parents. I’ve only read a couple of the stories so far but the introduction has been my favourite part of the book I’ve read so far. I think Hill needs to write an autobiography, I have a feeling he has lots of great stories, and advice, to share.

My Teaser

My brain doesn’t move fast enough for conversation, but words on a page will wait for me. Books are patient with slow learners. The rest of the world isn’t.

Loc147 Full Throttle by Joe Hill

Blurb

In this masterful collection of short fiction, Joe Hill dissects timeless human struggles in thirteen relentless tales of supernatural suspense, including “In The Tall Grass,” one of two stories co-written with Stephen King, basis for the terrifying feature film from Netflix.

A little door that opens to a world of fairy tale wonders becomes the blood-drenched stomping ground for a gang of hunters in “Faun.” A grief-stricken librarian climbs behind the wheel of an antique Bookmobile to deliver fresh reads to the dead in “Late Returns.” In “By the Silver Water of Lake Champlain,” two young friends stumble on the corpse of a plesiosaur at the water’s edge, a discovery that forces them to confront the inescapable truth of their own mortality . . . and other horrors that lurk in the water’s shivery depths. And tension shimmers in the sweltering heat of the Nevada desert as a faceless trucker finds himself caught in a sinister dance with a tribe of motorcycle outlaws in “Throttle,” co-written with Stephen King.

Featuring two previously unpublished stories, and a brace of shocking chillers, Full Throttle is a darkly imagined odyssey through the complexities of the human psyche. Hypnotic and disquieting, it mines our tormented secrets, hidden vulnerabilities, and basest fears, and demonstrates this exceptional talent at his very best.

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.

This week my teaser comes from The Wych Elm by Tana French, a book I received from NetGalley but only got around to starting yesterday. I do love Tana French books but I seem to be having a few issues with this one. Nothing wrong with it (it’s definitely me and not the book) but it starts with a pretty brutal attack on the MC and it’s so vivid and real it kind of freaked me out. Think it may be getting put on the back burner a little longer.

My Teaser

There was something horrifying about being exposed and handled so efficiently and impersonally. He was acting like my body was meat, not attached to a person at all.

8% The Wych Elm by Tana French

Blurb

For me it all goes back to that night, the dark corroded hinge between before and after, the slipped-in sheet of trick glass that tints everything on one side in its own murky colours and leaves everything on the other luminous and untouchable.

One night changes everything for Toby. A brutal attack leaves him traumatised, unsure even of the person he used to be. He seeks refuge at the family’s ancestral home, the Ivy House, filled with cherished memories of wild-strawberry summers and teenage parties with his cousins.

But not long after Toby’s arrival, a discovery is made. A skull, tucked neatly inside the old wych elm in the garden.

As detectives begin to close in, Toby is forced to examine everything he thought he knew about his family, his past, and himself.

A spellbinding standalone from a literary writer who turns the crime genre inside out, The Wych Elm asks what we become, and what we’re capable of, if we no longer know who we are.