Book beginnings on Fridays is hosted by Rose City Reader and it is a chance to share the first sentence or so of a book you’ve reading, about to read or recently read.
This week the book I’d like to share is ‘Nick’ by Michael Farris Smith. I’m on the blog tour for it this month, so keep your eyes peeled for my review…
A heavy morning fog draped across Paris and there was the corner café. The wicker chairs and the flowers on each table and the small man with the small eyes who sang while he worked. The chairs next to the window where Nick sat each morning and drank espresso and watched the hours of his leave tick away and on the days when the sun filtered through the three and fell upon the cathedral across the street it seemed to him that there could be no killing. There could be no war. There could be no way that one man could drive a bayonet through the skin and bone of anther until the tip of the blade dug into the earth underneath. On the days when the children began to appear in the park in front of the cathedral and climb and tumble and chase the sun came fill and the small man sang a long and running son, then he felt the strange calmness of belonging in such moment, so far from home, so close to going back to the front, the assurance of the Parisian day warming him so much that sometimes he has to unbutton the top button of his uniform and allow the warmth to escape before it became something else.
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