More Novels

So many stories yet to swim in...

Three more that I must get to before (before, before), at least judging from their opening lines:

"I arrived in this port with very few belongings: four shirts, my calligraphy implements, and a heart in a glass jar."

Pablo de Santis, Voltaire's Calligrapher (orig. 2001; translated from the Spanish, 2010 by Lisa Carter).

"That winter there were reports in the newspaper of an iceberg the size of a galleon floating in creaking majesty past St. Hauda's Land's cliffs, of a snuffling hog leading lost hill walkers out of the crags beneath Lomdendol Tor, of a dumbfounded ornithologist counting five albino crows in a flock of two hundred. But Midas Crook did not read the newspaper; he only looked at the photographs."

Ali Shaw, The Girl with Glass Feet (2009).

"Her father had laid his magnifying glass down on the map unrolled before him. A mournful sea monster loomed below the lens. Although it was the middle of the day, the blindness shrouded the bookshelves that rose behind him in false dusk. Only the large window over his head and the desk were still bright and clear.

'Nonna was blind when she died,' Carolina said."

Carey Wallace, The Blind Contessa's New Machine (2010).