First Chapter First Paragraph Tuesday Intros - Forest Dark; Nicole Krauss

Every Tuesday I host First Chapter First Paragraph Tuesday Intros sharing the first paragraph, maybe two, of a book that I'm reading or plan to read soon.  (This intro is a bit long, but, it really drew me in and made me want to read more).

Forest Dark; Nicole Krauss

Harper - 2017

1

Ayeka

"AT THE TIME of his disappearance, Epstein had been living in Tel Aviv for three months.  No one had seen his apartment.  His daughter Lucie had come to visit with her children, but Epstein installed them in the Hilton, where he met them for lavish breakfasts at which he only sipped tea.  When Lucie asked to come over, he'd begged off, explaining that the place was small and modest, not fit for receiving guests.  Still reeling from her parents' late divorce, she'd looked at him through narrow eyes--nothing about Epstein had previously been small or modest--but despite her suspicion she'd had ho accept it, along with all the other changes that had come over her father.  In the end, it was the police detectives who showed Lucie, Jonah, and Maya into their father's apartment, which turned out to be in a crumbling building near the ancient port of Jaffa.  The paint was peeling, and the shower let down directly above the toilet.  A cockroach strutted majestically across the stone floor.  Only after the police detective stomped on it with his shoe did it occur to Maya, Epstein's youngest and most intelligent child, that it may have been the last to see her father.  If Epstein ever really lived there at all--the only things that suggested he had inhabited the place were some books warped by the humid air that came through an open window and a bottle of the Coumadin pills he'd taken since the discovery of an partial fibrillation five years earlier.  It could have been called squalid, and yet the place had more in common with the slums of Calcutta than it did with the rooms in which his children had stayed with their father on the Amalfi coast and Cap d'Antibes.  Though, like those other rooms, this one also had a view of the sea."

Does this intro make you curious for more?

Please feel free to join in each Tuesday with your own "First Chapter, First Paragraph Intro" by linking your post from the book you are reading below.