TEASER TUESDAY: AN INVENTORY OF HEAVEN BY JANE FEAVER

This week’s Teaser Tuesday comes from An Inventory of Heaven by Jane Feaver. The cover and the blurb both attracted me to this story, which I’m now about halfway through. I am finding it a very slow-building story – more on the reflective side. Here’s the teaser:

It was a picture from before I was born, from the fairy tale that was my mother’s marriage. Fairy tale! How quickly I betrayed her. As if I had never spun gold from straw.

Here’s the blurb:

By turns chilling and poignant, An Inventory of Heaven is a lyrical and intimate meditation on the things we hold onto in life and how, in the end, we can try to let them go. As a young woman, Mavis Gaunt leaves post-war London to make a new life for herself in rural Devon, where she spent a few blissful months of her childhood as an evacuee. Living alone in the verdant hamlet of Shipleigh, she believes she’s found a heaven on earth – until a violent tragedy brings trouble to paradise, and turns Mavis’s idyllic solitude into a tormented, guarded isolation. Decades later, the arrival of a newcomer to the village forces Mavis to make a final reckoning: should she take her horrible secret to the grave? Or, should she summon up her ghosts and, in doing so, lay them to rest? An Inventory of Heaven is a lyrical and intimate meditation on the rural life, falling in love and the long passing of time.

What do you think? Sound like something you’d read?

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Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!