I had ten minutes at the library to come up with a quiz, so here you go. Read the excerpt and guess which book it’s from. Sounds easy, right?
Leave your guesses in a comment. Good luck!
No Googling or looking at other commenter answers. Yes, we’re going by the honor system 🙂 Play every week or just one time, you are always welcome 🙂 It only takes once to be eligible for a prize.
1.
In the beginning it was not raining, but it is raining now—and steadily. It has been raining for so long that even though it has not always been raining the townspeople begin to feel as though this is the case—as though the weather has always been this way, the sky this gray, the puddles this profound. They feel, sometimes, as though the sun has never risen over their town at all, not ever; that its very existence is nothing but a rumor: a product of the same sort of fallacy and telescopic inaccuracy that had everyone thinking for so long that the world was flat or that the constellations were arranged in patterns. Noah’s Wife
2.
Ephram Jennings had watched this for eleven years. Seen her black-bottomed foot kick a swirl of dust in its wake. Every day he wanted nothing more than to put each tired sole in his wide wooden tub, brush them both in warm soapy water, cream them with sweet oil and lanoline and then slip her feet, one by one into a pair of red-heel socks.
3.
In the ghetto there is a mansion, and it is my father’s house. It sits on seven acres, surrounded by growling row homes, frozen in an architectural class war. Its expansive lawn is utterly useless, wild like it smokes its own grass and dreams of being a jungle. The street around it is even worse: littered with the disposables no one could bother to put in a can, the cars on their last American owner, the living dead roaming slow and steady to nowhere. And this damn house, which killed my father, is as big as it is old, decaying to gray pulp yet somehow still standing there, with its phallic white pillars and the intention of eternity.
4.
Camaro Espinoza awoke before dawn. She had fled New York City after the killing of five men exactly 364 days before.
5.
Christian Wingmark moved his eyes from the dice he was holding to the fly on the watchmaker’s forehead. It was moving slowly, counterclockwise. Between them towered stacks of coins. More than 107 riksdaler. The only thing that mattered. When he threw the three dice, any count above nine would win him the whole pot. Only the gaming board could offer the prospect of a better life to a troubadour and rogue like him, who otherwise lived a vile and foul-smelling existence.
6.
Pale light crept into the black stanchions of pine, the ashen ground, the red center of dying coals. The camped men rose, silent, and broke the bread of old pillage between blackened fingers. One of their number looked at his own. Soot and powder, ash and dirt. Neat crescents accrued underneath the nails, trim and black, like he’d tried to dig himself out of a hole in the ground. Or into one.
7.
Hands in his pockets, Rebus turned to face Cafferty. They were old men now, similar builds, similar backgrounds. Sat together in a pub, the casual onlooker might mistake them for pals who’d known one another since school. But their history told a different story.
8.
Before Joe arrived at Misto’s cottage, when Dulcie and the old cat were alone together, he’d given her a.deep, steady look. “Life and death hang in balance, now, Dulcie. My life is ending. But you, alone, guard new lives.” How could he know that? She had looked at him, shocked, her green eyes wide.
9.
On December 7, 2059, Emilio Sandoz was released from the isolation ward of Salvator Mundi Hospital in the middle of the night and transported in a bread van to the Jesuit Residence at Number 5 Borgo Santo Spìrito, a few minutes’ walk across St. Peter’s Square from the Vatican. The next day, ignoring shouted questions and howls of journalistic outrage as he read, a Jesuit spokesman issued a short statement to the frustrated and angry media mob that had gathered outside Number 5’s massive front door.
10.
I know Holly’s da, a bit. Frank Mackey, Undercover. You go at him straight, he’ll dodge and come in sideways; you go at him sideways, he’ll charge head down. I said, ‘You came here because there’s something you want me to know. I’m not going to play guessing games I can’t win. If you’re not sure you want to tell me, then go away and have a think till you are. If you’re sure now, then spit it out.’ Holly approved of that. Almost smiled again; nodded instead. ‘There’s this board,’ she said. ‘In school. A noticeboard. It’s on the top floor, across from the art room. It’s called the Secret Place. If you’ve got a secret, like if you hate your parents or you like a guy or whatever, you can put it on a card and stick it up there.’
Last week’s Amish Quiz.