TEASER TUESDAY: LETTERS TO THE END OF LOVE BY YVETTE WALKER

Yvette Walker will be my next guest, with Annabel Smith, at Stories on Stage in Perth. I started reading her book, Letters to the End of Love, this morning. The book won Walker a Western Australian Premier’s Book Award 2014 in the Emerging Writers category and has attracted lots of praise. I’ve only just started, but already I’m touched by the depth of Walker’s writing. For my interview with Walker, click here. Here’s the teaser:

The night we met I thought it strange you weren’t wearing a wristwatch. I didn’t know then that there were no wristwatches in the Soviet Union. You had strong wrists and a painter’s callus. You looked like you had lifted the world that morning and set it down again. (p15)

And here’s the blurb:

With the readability of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society and the literary grace of Colm Tóibin, this brilliant debut novel satisfies on all levels. Three stories, three secrets, three marriages. In a coastal village in Cork in 1969, a Russian painter and his Irish novelist wife write letters to one another as they try to come to terms with a fatal illness. On Australia’s west coast in 2011, a bookseller writes to her estranged partner in an attempt to understand what has happened to their relationship. In Bournemouth in 1948, a retired English doctor writes letters to the love of his life, a German artist he lived with in Vienna during the 1930s. The simple domestic lives of these three couples are set against conversations about intimacy, art, war and loss. Told in a series of unforgettable letters, this is a novel about love and what it means when it might be coming to an end.

Sound good? Would you read this book?

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!