First Lines Friday – #Orentober edition #4

Hi and welcome to First Lines Friday – #Orentober edition!

First Lines Fridays is a weekly feature for book lovers hosted by Wandering Words. What if instead of judging a book by its cover, its author or its prestige, we judged it by its opening lines?

I love this feature, and I thought it would be a fun way to shine the spotlights on some fab Orenda books. So here goes:

I bring the blade of the axe down on her neck.

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Drop the head into one bucket, the body into another, hear the way her claws scrape slightly against the plastic before silence falls once again.

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I’m sure that if you’ve read this book, those first lines stuck with you, but if you haven’t, can you guess the book???

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This seems such a gruesome book, judging it by those first lines, but actually, it’s not.

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It’s contemporary fiction with a mother-daughter relationship at its heart.

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It tackles a difficult theme with love and empathy and humour.

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Its author has been referred to as the Norwegian Anne Tyler.

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And this is her second book with Orenda Books.

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It is:

This is the blurb and you can find my review here and an excerpt here, if you’d like to know more:

Anne’s diagnosis of terminal cancer shines a spotlight onto fractured relationships with her daughter and granddaughter, with surprising, heartwarming results. A moving, warmly funny novel by the Norwegian Anne Tyler.
Anne’s life is rushing to an unexpected and untimely end. But her diagnosis of terminal cancer isn’t just a shock for her – and for her daughter Sigrid and granddaughter Mia – it shines a spotlight onto their fractured and uncomfortable relationships.
On a spur-of-the moment trip to France the three generations of women reveal harboured secrets, long-held frustrations and suppressed desires, and learn humbling and heartwarming lessons about how life should be lived when death is so close.
With all of Helga Flatland’s trademark humour, razor-sharp wit and deep empathy, One Last Time examines the great dramas that can be found in ordinary lives, asks the questions that matter to us all – and ultimately celebrates the resilience of the human spirit, in an exquisite, enchantingly beautiful novel that us to treasure and rethink … everything.

Thanks for stopping by! What do you make of this first line, yay or nay? Let me know below!

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