RAINY DAY EXCERPTS: “LIE WITH ME”

Welcome to another Tuesday celebrating bookish events, First Chapter/Intros, originally hosted by Bibliophile by the Sea and now hosted by I’d Rather Be at the Beach; and Teaser Tuesdays hosted by The Purple Booker.

Today’s feature is one of my new books:   Lie With Me, by Sabine Durrant, a book about which is said:  ‘If you’ve had a hole in your literary life since finishing Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train, this is the book to fill it’ Grazia…
 

 

 

Intro:  (Before)

It was a wet day, one of those grey, drizzly London afternoons when the sky and the pavement and the rain-streaked buildings converge.  It’s a long time since I’ve seen weather like that.

I’d just had lunch with my oldest friend Michael Steele at Porter’s in the Charing Cross underpass, a wine bar we had frequented since, at the age of sixteen, we had first discovered the discretion of both its location and its landlord.  These days, of course,, we would both have much rather met somewhere less dank and dark (that chic little bistro on St. Martin’s Lane specialising in wines from the Loire, par example), but nostalgia can be a tyranny.  Neither of us would have dreamt of suggesting it.

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Teaser:  The bad afternoon, the one I had tried to forget, came in fragments—drink and an argument, Saffron’s hand in the air, a bottle at my head, the naked limbs of another woman. (p.58).

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Synopsis:  It starts with a lie. The kind we’ve all told – to a former acquaintance we can’t quite place but still, for some reason, feel the need to impress. The story of our life, embellished for the benefit of the happily married lawyer with the kids and the lovely home.

And the next thing you know, you’re having dinner at their house, and accepting an invitation to join them on holiday – swept up in their perfect life, the kind you always dreamed of…

Which turns out to be less than perfect. But by the time you’re trapped and sweating in the relentless Greek sun, burning to escape the tension all around you – by the time you start to realise that, however painful the truth might be, it’s the lies that cause the real damage…

… well, by then, it could just be too late.

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What do you think?  Do the snippets grab you?  Would you keep reading?

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