First Lines Fridays

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!

For my fifteenth birthday, my grandfather let me dig my own grave. It was dawn when he woke me. He was standing over my bed with an oil lamp in one hand and a brand-new shovel in the other. I remember how bright its blade was in the darkness. I think he had been awake all night, going at it with his whetstone. ‘Happy Birthday,’ he said. ‘Shall we get started?’

Any ideas?

Goodreads Synopsis:

To the horror of young gravedigger, Ned, body-snatchers have been visiting his churchyard in the dead of night. Until now, he’d been daydreaming about another visitor – daughter of the manor, Obedience Wellrest.

But 16-year-old Obedience has troubles of her own: her loving but overbearing father, and his wish to see her married to a rich man of science, Phineas Mordaunt.

But when Mordaunt starts to poke his nose into her family history – in particular, the ruinous research of late Uncle Herbert – Obedience enters into a dangerous game of Death, and Ned might be the only person who can save her …