First Lines Friday 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!
First Lines:
“Blackberries should be out of season now, but I find a bramble still dotted with plump fruit, soaking up the autumn sun. Some are mouldering on the vine, but enough look edible that I take off my jacket and use it to carry the berries, sling style.”
Do you recognize the lines?
Here’s a hint:
It’s a new dystopian romance.
Still not sure? Here’s another hint:
It’s written by Emily Paxman.
The First Lines Friday book is:
All We Have Left
Title: All We Have Left Pages: 384 Publication Date: June 30, 2026 Publisher: Titan Synopsis: Thirty years after the end of the world, a young woman enters into a marriage of convenience with a man she hardly knows so she can secure vital medical care for her beloved younger sister.
The world might not have ended all at once. But end it did.
Kayla Hollins is a survivor. Living in the fragmented wasteland of the Canadian Pacific Northwest, she’s outlived a colony, a cult, a paramilitary group, and most of her family. So when her younger sister April falls seriously ill, Kayla will do anything to save her. They trek to Salt Spring Island, a beacon of hope in their otherwise brutalized world, which is rumoured to still have a hospital. But Salt Spring’s utopia comes with a price. Not just anyone can enter paradise or access their medical care, and Kayla’s past is chequered.
Desperate, Kayla makes a deal with Sid Charles, an aspiring politician with whom she had a chance encounter before arriving on Salt Spring. If Kayla and Sid get married, it will boost Sid’s chances of election, and grant April automatic access to the medical treatment she desperately needs. And in two years, when Kayla is eligible for citizenship herself, they can get a divorce. Simple, right?
Sid is distant and cranky, but Kayla comes to learn he is also shockingly kind. The more time she spends with him and his ragtag group of rescued boys, the more she comes to admire him. But with April’s treatment and Sid’s election on the line—and the constant terror of her past being discovered—Kayla isn’t sure she can risk trying to change their arrangement.
Trapped together in the closest thing left to paradise, Kayla and Sid both know what it means for the world to end. But as they try to rebuild with the people of Salt Spring Island, there may be time left to save—if not the world—themselves.
