Fabulous First Line Friday (11 May)

To celebrate the National Year of Reading, we are sharing some first lines from books on our bookshelves. So, every Friday for the rest of the year we’re posting a fabulous first line here on Soup Blog.

Here’s today’s Fabulous First Line*:

Marley was dead: to begin with.

Do you want to read on? What do you think comes next?

Do you know the name of the book? (We’ll put it right at the end of this post so you can try to guess first.)

*For the purposes of Fabulous First Line Friday, we’re counting the first line as the first line of chapter 1 in any book. So if there is an introduction or an author’s note or something before chapter 1, we don’t count that bit …

The book is A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens