Jamaica Inn by Daphne du Maurier -- BOOK BEGINNINGS

 

BOOK BEGINNINGS ON FRIDAYS

Jamaica Inn by Daphne du Maurier

Thank you for joining me for Book Beginnings on Fridays. Please share the opening sentence (or so) of the book you are reading this week. You can also share from a book that caught your fancy, even if you are not reading it right now.

MY BOOK BEGINNING

It was a cold grey day in late November. The weather had changed overnight, when a backing wind brought a granite sky and a mizzling rain with it, and although it was now only a little after two o’clock in the afternoon the pallor of a winter evening seemed to have closed upon the hills, cloaking them in mist.

-- from Jamaica Inn by Daphne du Maurier. I offer the opening two sentences because the first sentence, on its own, is pretty boring. But that second sentence really sets a scene!

Jamaica Inn is one of my favorite books and probably my favorite du Maurier books (although there are many runners-up). It's such a wild tale of smugglers and wreckers on the Cornish coast.

I'm not reading it right now, having read it last year with my Du Maurier Deep Dive group on Instagram. But I was organizing my bookshelves and this fabulous cover caught my eye. 

Are you a fan of du Maurier? Do you have a favorite?

YOUR BOOK BEGINNINGS

Please add the link to your Book Beginnings post in the box below. If you share on social media, please use the #bookbeginnings hashtag.

Mister Linky's Magical Widgets -- Thumb-Linky widget will appear right here!
This preview will disappear when the widget is displayed on your site.
If this widget does not appear, click here to display it.

THE FRIDAY 56

The Friday 56 is a natural tie-in with Book Beginnings. The idea is to share a two-sentence teaser from page 56 of your featured book. If you are reading an ebook or audiobook, find your teaser from the 56% mark.

Freda at Freda's Voice started and hosted The Friday 56 for a long, long time. She is taking a break and Anne at My Head is Full of Books has taken on hosting duties in her absence. Please visit Anne's blog and link to your Friday 56 post.

MY FRIDAY 56

-- from Jamaica Inn:

This was at any rate Mary's hope, and meanwhile she must make the best of the grim six months that lay ahead, and, if possible, she was determined to have the better of her uncle in the long run, and expose him and his confederates to the law. She would have shrugged her shoulders at smuggling alone, though the flagrant dishonesty of the trade disgusted her, but all she had seen so far went to prove that Joss Merlyn and his friends were not content with this only; they were desperate men, afraid of nothing and no one, and did not stop at murder.

FROM THE PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION

On a bitter November evening, young Mary Yellan journeys across the rainswept moors to Jamaica Inn in honor of her mother's dying request. When she arrives, the warning of the coachman begins to echo in her memory, for her aunt Patience cowers before hulking Uncle Joss Merlyn. Terrified of the inn's brooding power, Mary gradually finds herself ensnared in the dark schemes being enacted behind its crumbling walls -- and tempted to love a man she dares not trust.