Fittingly for International Women's Day, post #137 of my #bookcovers and #firstsentences homage on Instagram is Bluebottle by the Australian writer #BelindaCastles (#AllenAndUnwin 2018).

I perused my bookcase this morning and found most of my latter-day (post-2000) fiction titles are by women writers. And this is one of my favourites, as I commented in a review of Bluebottle for Writing NSW:

"Castles has written a beautiful book. Her flowing narrative, well-crafted characters, and underlying dark suspense had me hooked until the last page. ... Some books are page-turners — I found Bluebottle to be more than that. I'd beat my alarm each morning and reach for the book for the joy of a chapter before getting up to start the day."

You can see why the book hooked me from Castle's first sentences:

There was a house on a honeycomb cliff above the Pacific, perched over the beach in air as scrubbed and softened as old linen. A deep scoop of land in front had fallen away and sat in rocky clumps in the water beneath, surfacing at low tide. The house was humble: made of apricot fibro, its roof dull and rusted, the scrub on the escarpment reaching up towards it, ready to pull it down. When storm heads built out to sea, you could imagine it in pieces, splintered slabs jutting from the surf, like those rocks that were once land in the sky.

Bluebottle post on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/p/Bpf0o_iFZYj/