# Read the first page of The Storyteller by Jodi Picoult Read the opening of The Storyteller by Jodi Picoult free, no signup. A young baker befriends an old man who asks her to kill him. - Page: https://uncovered.ink/read/the-storyteller-jodi-picoult - Genre: Domestic fiction - Year: 2013 - ISBN: 9781668077399 - Read it blind (cover and title hidden): https://uncovered.ink/?b=9781668077399&s=read-page - Buy: https://bookshop.org/a/125786/9781668077399 - Borrow: https://search.worldcat.org/search?q=9781668077399 ## The opening My father trusted me with the details of his death. “Ania,” he would say, “no whiskey at my funeral. I want the finest blackberry wine. No weeping, mind you. Just dancing. And when they lower me into the ground, I want a fanfare of trumpets, and white butterflies.” A character, that was my father. He was the village baker, and every day, in addition to the loaves he would make for the town, he would create a single roll for me that was as unique as it was delicious: a twist like a princess’s crown, dough mixed with sweet cinnamon and the richest chocolate. The secret ingredient, he said, was his love for me, and this made it taste better than anything else I had ever eaten. We lived on the outskirts of a village so small that everyone knew everyone else by name. Our home was made of river stone, with a thatched roof; the hearth where my father baked heated the entire cottage. I would sit at the kitchen table, shelling peas that I grew in the small garden out back, as my father opened the door of the brick oven and slid the peel inside to take out crusty, round loaves of bread. The red embers glowed, outlining the strong muscles of his back as he sweated through his tunic. “I don’t want a summer funeral, Ania,” he would say. “Make sure instead I die on a cool day, when there’s a nice breeze. Before the birds fly south, so that they can sing for me.” I would pretend to take note of his requests. I didn’t mind the macabre conversation; my father was far too strong for me to believe any of these requests of his would ever come to pass. Some of the others in the village found it strange, the relationship I had with my father, the fact that we could joke about this, but my mother had died when I was an infant and all we had was each other. The trouble started on my eighteenth birthday. At first, it was just the farmers who complained; who would come out to feed their chickens and find only an explosion of bloody feathers in the coop, or a calf nearly turned inside out, flies buzzing around its carcass. “A fox,” said Baruch Beiler, the tax collector, who lived in a mansion that sat at the bottom of the village square like a jewel at the throat of a royal. “Maybe a wildcat. Pay what you owe, and in return, you will be protected.” He came to our cottage one day when we were unprepared for him, and by this I mean we did not manage to barricade the doors and douse the fire and make it seem as if we were not at home. My father was shaping loaves into hearts, as he always did on my birthday, so that the whole town knew it was a special day. Baruch Beiler swept into the kitchen, lifted his gold-tipped cane, and smacked the worktable. Flour rose in a cloud, and when it settled I looked down at the dough between my father’s hands, at that broken heart. “Please,” said my father, who never begged. “I know what I promised. But business has been slow. If you give me just a little more time—” “You’re in default, Emil,” Beiler said. “I hold the lien on this rathole.” He leaned closer. For the first time in my life, I did not think my father invincible. “Because I am a generous man, a magnanimous man, I will give you till the end of the week. But if you don’t come up with the money, well, I can’t say what might happen.” He lifted his cane, sliding it between his hands like a weapon. “There have been so many . . . misfortunes lately.” ## Books with a similar feel - [Mansfield Park by Jane Austen](https://uncovered.ink/read/mansfield-park-jane-austen.md) - [The Hypnotist's Love Story by Liane Moriarty](https://uncovered.ink/read/the-hypnotists-love-story-liane-moriarty.md) - [To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf](https://uncovered.ink/read/to-the-lighthouse-virginia-woolf.md) - [The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky](https://uncovered.ink/read/the-brothers-karamazov-fyodor-dostoyevsky.md) - [The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë](https://uncovered.ink/read/the-tenant-of-wildfell-hall-anne-bronte.md) - [Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert](https://uncovered.ink/read/madame-bovary-gustave-flaubert.md) --- Source: Uncovered (https://uncovered.ink). A short sample shown for reading and discovery. Rights holders can request removal at https://uncovered.ink/takedown.