SERENDIPITOUS TUESDAYS: INTROS/TEASERS – HOW TO BE A GOOD WIFE

 

 

 

Welcome to another Tuesday celebrating bookish events, from Tuesday/First Chapter/Intros, hosted by Bibliophile by the Sea; and Teaser Tuesdays hosted by Should Be Reading.

Today’s feature is one of my books for this week:  How To Be a Good Wife, by Emma Chapman, an ARC from Amazon Vine.

Intro:  Today, somehow, I am a smoker.

I did not know this about myself.  As far as I remember, I have never smoked before.

It feels unnatural, ill-fitting, for a woman of my age:  a wife, a mother with a grown-up son, to sit in the middle of the day with a cigarette between her fingers.   Hector hates smoking.  He always coughs sharply when we walk behind someone smoking on the street, and I imagine his vocal cords rubbing together, moist and pink like chicken flesh.

I rub the small white face of my watch.  Twelve fifteen.  By this time, I am usually working on something in the kitchen.  I must prepare supper for this evening, the recipe book propped open on the stand that Hector bought me for an early wedding anniversary.  I must make bread:  mix the ingredients in a large bowl, knead it on the cold wooden worktop, watch it rise in the oven.  Hector likes to have fresh bread in the mornings.  Make your home a place of peace and order.

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Teaser:  The glow of the shop emerges out of the lowering fog.  My headlights make it swirl, the light losing itself in the opaque white air.  When I turn off the engine, the silence is total.  (p. 136).

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Blurb:   In the tradition of Emma Donoghue’s Room and S.J. Watson’s Before I Go to Sleep, How To Be a Good Wife by Emma Chapman is a haunting literary debut about a woman who begins having visions that make her question everything she knows

Marta and Hector have been married for a long time. Through the good and bad; through raising a son and sending him off to life after university. So long, in fact, that Marta finds it difficult to remember her life before Hector. He has always taken care of her, and she has always done everything she can to be a good wife—as advised by a dog-eared manual given to her by Hector’s aloof mother on their wedding day.

But now, something is changing. Small things seem off. A flash of movement in the corner of her eye, elapsed moments that she can’t recall. Visions of a blonde girl in the darkness that only Marta can see. Perhaps she is starting to remember—or perhaps her mind is playing tricks on her. As Marta’s visions persist and her reality grows more disjointed, it’s unclear if the danger lies in the world around her, or in Marta herself. The girl is growing more real every day, and she wants something.

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What do you think?  Haunting?  Eerie?  Crazy?  I know I can’t wait to read it.