Friday Focus: The Friday 56 & Book Beginnings #27

It's Friday . . . time to share excerpts from one of my current reads with:

• Book Beginnings on Fridays hosted by Rose City Reader, where bloggers share the first sentence or more of a current read, as well as initial thoughts about the sentence(s), impressions of the book, or anything else that the opening inspires.  
• The Friday 56 hosted by Freda's Voice, where you grab a book and turn to page 56 (or 56% of an ebook), find one or more interesting sentences (no spoilers), and post them.

This week's selection:

 

 

Beginning:   Chapter One  January 1895

Sometimes in the night he dreamed about the dead - familiar faces and the others, half-forgotten ones, fleetingly summoned up. Now as he woke, it was, he imagined, an hour or more before the dawn; there would be no sound or movement for several hours.

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Page 56:  "He watched her smiling warmly and then almost sadly as she closed the door.  Everything about her in those moments, from her stance, to the expressions on her face, to her gestures as she turned back to the hallway, was borrowed from their mother.  She was making an effort, Henry saw, to become the woman of the house."

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From barnesandnoble.com:  Like Michael Cunningham in The Hours, Colm Tóibín captures the extraordinary mind and heart of a great writer. Beautiful and profoundly moving, The Master tells the story of a man born into one of America's first intellectual families who leaves his country in the late nineteenth century to live in Paris, Rome, Venice, and London among privileged artists and writers.

In stunningly resonant prose, Tóibín captures the loneliness and the hope of a master of psychological subtlety whose forays into intimacy inevitably failed those he tried to love. The emotional intensity of this portrait is riveting.

Finalist for the 2004 Man Booker Prize for Fiction

Enjoy life with books . . .

 

Catherine

 

Friday Focus: The Friday 56 & Book Beginnings #27 was originally published by Catherine for bookclublibrarian.com. This post cannot be republished without attribution.