Late Fall - #TeaserTuesday and First Chapter / First Paragraph / Tuesday Intros

   In Late Fall, author Noelle Adams shows amazing insight into the feelings and concerns of her protagonist, a 71-year-old woman who moves from her long-time home to a retirement village. The author shows her character's introspection and reveals her personality in the ways she reacts to the experience of living with others after many years alone. Ellie is a strong, independent woman with lots of life left in her. Although the character seems much older than 71 to me (maybe that says something about my own age!), the result is a touching story that I won't soon forget.

Genre: Contemporary Women's Fiction
Book Length: 276 Pages
Amazon Link: Late Fall
Other Books by This Author: HERE

First Paragraph:
    Almost every morning for the last twenty-five years, I've walked a dirt path that leads from my backyard to a little graveyard in the woods.
    On this, my last morning, I do it one more time.

Teaser at 9% on my Kindle:
I don't want to be surrounded by a lot of annoying retired people and forced to participate in ridiculous activities I'm expected to enjoy just because I have gray hair.
    I didn't like games and ice cream socials when I was younger, and I sure don't want to put up with them now.

Blurb: 
     This is life. After summer, the green leaves always change colors and fall off the trees. Dogs die, no matter how much you love them. Land is sold, even if you used to tell yourself you were going to die on the property. And people get old.
     Even me.

[Longer synopsis here]

Teaser Tuesday is hosted by Jenn of Books and A Beat. Post two sentences from somewhere in a book you're reading. No spoilers, please!

Link at Books and A Beat

First Chapter/First Paragraph/Tuesday Intros is hosted by Bibliophile By The Sea. To participate, share the first paragraph (or a few) from a book you're reading or thinking about reading soon.

Link at BibliophileByTheSea

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The Time In Between - The Friday 56 and Book Beginnings on Friday

The Time In Between by Maria Dueñas has it all - mystery, intrigue, history, exotic settings, romance, and a strong female protagonist, set in the years leading up to World War II. This book grabbed me and wouldn't let go!
     As someone who sews as a hobby, I also enjoyed reading about the main character's profession as a seamstress and the styles women wore during that era. The author lists an extensive bibliography at the end of the book, which tells me she did a mountain of research. It shows in the detail. I highly recommend this book.
FYI: Billed as "Spain's Downton Abbey", the book was made into a miniseries. Subtitled episodes are available on DramaFever and Hulu's Drama Fever Channel. 

Book Beginning:
     A typewriter shattered my destiny. The culprit was a Hispano-Olivetti, and for weeks, a store window kept it from me. Looking back now, from the vantage point of the years gone by, it's hard to believe a simple mechanical object could have the power to divert the course of an entire life in just four short days, to pulverize the intricate plans on which it was built. And yet that is how it was, and there was nothing I could have done to stop it.

The Friday 56 (two sentences from Page 56 in my trade paperback):
     I discovered that there are substances you can smoke or inject or snort that will jumble your senses, that there are people capable of gambling away their mother at a baccarat table, and that there are passions of the flesh that allow for far more combinations than just those of a man and a woman horizontally on a mattress. I learned, too, that there are things that happen in the world that my dim education had never touched upon: I found out that years earlier there had been a great war in Europe, that Germany was being ruled by someone called Hitler who was admired by some and feared by others, and that someone who one day occupied a given place with a feeling of permanence could the following day vanish in order to save his skin, to avoid being beaten to death or ending up in a place worse than his darkest nightmare.

Genre: Historical Fiction / World Literature (Spanish & Portuguese)
Book Length: 609 Pages
Amazon Link: The Time In Between



Synopsis:
     The Time In Between is a word-of-mouth phenomenon that catapulted María Dueñas, a debut author, to the top of Spain's bestseller lists.
     This sweeping novel, which combines the storytelling power of The Shadow of the Wind with the irresistible romance of Casablanca, moves at an unstoppable pace. Suddenly left abandoned and penniless in Morocco by her lover, Sira Quiroga forges a new identity. Against all odds she becomes the most sought-after couture designer for the socialite wives of German Nazi officers. But she is soon embroiled in a dangerous political conspiracy as she passes information to the British Secret Service through a code stitched into the hems of her dresses.

                

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