Teaser Tuesdays: Among the Victorians

Teaser Tuesdays is hosted by MizB at Should Be Reading. And these are the rules:

Grab your current read; Let the book fall open to a random page. Share with us two (2) “teaser” sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12. You also need to share the title of the book that you’re getting your “teaser” from … that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you’ve given! Please avoid spoilers!

This week, I'm sharing some teasers from The Great Victorian Collection, by Brian Moore:

Rebuked, Maloney moved out of the shed, still carrying the oil lamp. Opposite him now was one of the most peculiar rooms in the Collection, a room which experts said did not exist, a room he had read about in an obscure volume only available from the Reserved Shelf in the British Museum. [p. 122, Dutton Obelisk, 1985].

I've just started this one, so I'm not sure exactly what's going on here. But the premise of the novel is that one morning the book's protagonist Anthony Maloney wakes up to find that a dream he's had has come true: Outside his hotel window he sees a vast, magnificent collection of exquisite and rare Victorian objects. But just how real is the collection, and how will it affect his life and the lives of those around him? Well, that's what I'm itching to find out.

Brian Moore was born in Northern Ireland, but lived in Canada and the US for many years. The novel won both the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Canadian Governor General’s Award for Fiction in 1975, but is out of print now.

I'm also reading Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence, so I'll include a couple of teasers from that one, too – even though no one should need "teasing" to read this wonderful book.

All the elderly ladies whom Archer knew regarded any woman who loved imprudently as necessarily unscrupulous and designing, and mere simple-minded man as powerless in her clutches. The only thing to do was to persuade him, as early as possible, to marry a nice girl, and then trust to her to look after him. [p. 1093, Library of America edition of Wharton's novels]