One of my favorite authors is Edward Rutherfurd. He writes place-based historical fiction — big, fat volumes with lashings of strong characters and historical background that reads like local color, not a lecture. SO GOOD! In earlier volumes, he began with the first human settlement in a location (LONDON, SARUM), got you interested in a set of characters, then jumped ahead hundreds of years and took up the stories of their descendants. I LOVED that: seeing how this little weasel’s family got to be gentry, or how these marauders grew to be pillars of the community.

His more recent books have been shaking up that pattern. The latest, CHINA, is totally different. Still a whacking big book, but he sticks with the same characters over a period of about seventy years. Still riveting, but I would totally have been there with him if he had gone the old way. In fact, he can take up where he left off and take me through another seventy years.

ANYWAY, I liked this meditation by one of his characters:

It’s always a good rule in life to be as honest with people as you can, but never tell them where the money is.

— Laquer Nail, CHINA by Edward Rutherfurd

This post is part of Linda G. Hill’s weekly blog hop, One-Liner Wednesday. If you have a one-liner or just like them, follow the link.

A WRITING PROMPT FROM ME TO YOU: What happened when somebody told somebody else where the money is?

MA