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?

• Pick a book off your shelf (it could be your current read or on your TBR) and open to the first page
• Copy the first few lines, but don’t give anything else about the book away just yet – you need to hook the reader first
• Finally… reveal the book

I particularly enjoy this meme, as I often like to go back and re-read the first lines of the book I’m reading. I find you can often see new layers and new context to the opening paragraph once you’ve come to more intimately know the characters. I think the first lines of my current read are purely divine. Let’s see if you can guess.

“The night Effia Otcher was born into the musky heat of Fanteland, a fire raged through the woods just outside her father’s compound. It moved quickly, tearing a path for days. It lived off the air; it slept in the caves and hid in trees; it burned, up and through, unconcerned with what wreckage it left behind, until it reached an Asante village. There, it disappeared, becoming one with the night.“

You may know this one…

Anything yet??

And the book is…

Homegoing

by Yaa Gyasi

If you guessed this one, well done. I’m really enjoying Homegoing and hope to be able to review it in the next couple of days. Today I have plans to read as much as I can possibly squeeze into my free time! Until review time, happy reading!