Lorna Scott Fox

‘The Zapatistas a the best. Because they eat snake. They eat lion, and birds, like that one,’ whispered the little girl. She had come running up with a fistful of woven bracelets, the minute we’d edged past our first soldiers into the square at San Cristóbal. Night had just fallen, and it was almost empty. The ‘problems’, as everyone called the war, were hurting the crafts lifeline of the Chamula Indians as well as the tourist industry: mass cancellations meant that when the last of the reporters had left, the town would he bankrupt. We bought our first bracelets, and asked the child which army she preferred. She squirmed before saying ‘soldiers’ and laughing at us.

Here are three strangely similar book openings:

Born in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1909, the daughter of two ‘outsider’ parents, an Ohian and a Virginian. Eudora Welty has made a life’s work of belonging. She wandered only briefly, to the University of Wisconsin and then to Columbia, NY, an episode which left no trace in her writing. Soon she was back with her mother in Jackson, where she lives to this day, setting almost all her work within a hundred-mile radius of her home.