First Lines Fridays is a weekly feature for book lovers hosted by Wandering Words. What if instead of judging a book by its cover, its author or its prestige, we judged it by its opening lines?

• Pick a book off your shelf (it could be your current read or on your TBR) and open to the first page.
• Copy the first few lines, but don’t give anything else about the book away just yet – you need to hook the reader first.
• Finally… reveal the book!

Hello, hello! I hope you’ve all had a great week so far. The book I’ve chosen for this weeks post is a recent addition to my ARC tbr & by one of my favourite authors. It’s a 2023 gothic fantasy filled with dark secrets and the danger of believing in fairytales. I genuinely cannot wait to pick this one up!

“Once upon a time, Indigo Maxwell-Castenada found me. I had been lost a long time and had grown comfortable in the dark. I didn’t imagine anyone could lure me from it. But Indigo was one of those creatures who can hunt by scent alone, and the reek of my desperate wanting must have left a tantalizing, fluorescent trail”

How good does this sound! Ready to find out what it is??

Once upon a time, a man who believed in fairy tales married a beautiful, mysterious woman named Indigo Maxwell-Casteñada. He was a scholar of myths. She was heiress to a fortune. They exchanged gifts and stories and believed they would live happily ever after—and in exchange for her love, Indigo extracted a promise: that her bridegroom would never pry into her past.

But when Indigo learns that her estranged aunt is dying and the couple is forced to return to her childhood home, the House of Dreams, the bridegroom will soon find himself unable to resist. For within the crumbling manor’s extravagant rooms and musty halls, there lurks the shadow of another girl: Azure, Indigo’s dearest childhood friend who suddenly disappeared. As the house slowly reveals his wife’s secrets, the bridegroom will be forced to choose between reality and fantasy, even if doing so threatens to destroy their marriage . . . or their lives.