("Paying Guests", "The Miniaturist")

[fiefoe]

I gave Sarah Waters a good go this time, but the second half of the book apparently devolves into a murder investigation, and I don't want to watch things not end well in slow motion.

• As if anyone could possibly be deceived into thinking that the money was a mere formality, and not the essence, the shabby heart and kernel of the whole affair.
• Her mother... a faintly harried air she always had whenever she's left alone in the kitchen, as if she were a passenger in a stricken liner, who's just been bundled into the engine room and told to man the gauges.
• She was aware of (the upstairs tenants) like a speck in her eyes.
• Just like that, her heart was jangling. How grief can catch one out, still.
• (the part of Francis being anonymous in the city, feeling tingly because of shadow of some railing and knowing that to be the truest part of herself.)
• There it is, the little innuendo, as reliable as the cuckoo coming out of the clock.
• He looks at a woman being idle like a knife going rusty.
• They smiled at each other across the table, and some sort of shift occurred between them, there was a quickening, a livening, Francis could think of nothing to compare it with save some kind of culinary process. It was like the white of an egg growing pearly in hot water, the milk sauce thickening in the pan, it was subtle and yet as tangible as that.
• Her resolution was peeling like bark. /  We cross each other like a pair of scissors.
• The moment suspended like a drop of water, like a tear. / a fizz of impatience
• That charged moment..., his wife's hand an inch over her bosom, easing out that imaginary stake.
• The kiss unfurled, unfolded like a bolt of rippling silk.
• (After blissful skating:) It was sad.. to exchange motion, safety, glamour for safety and unstrained arches.
• a single pale thread in this dark dark tangle
• Fit herself back into her old life, like a snake going into its desiccated old skin.
• By the time she was back in the sitting room, on her hands and knees again, picking up hundreds of pearl-headed pins, she felt like a character in a fairy tale, who's set some impossible task, and yet, by a miracle, had managed to complete it.

_______________________________

Another book largely set in the interior (aka the women's quarter) and is faintly ominous from the start. Jessie Burton deserves a second look, but not with an audiobook.
__ The flowers (in paintings) harder than in life
__ a drop of dismay
__ each family having an ark in case of flood
__ The senior's is a world of plates.... Spanning the world in crockery.