A Celebration of
Great Opening Lines
in World Literature

Good News (1980)

The Queenpin (2007)

The unnamed narrator, a young bookkeeper at a seedy nightclub, is referring to the legs of Gloria Denton, a forty-something queenpin (think kingpin) in the underworld of casinos, racetracks, and similar venues. In the book, the opening line is presented in italics and comprises the entire first paragraph. In the second, the narrator continued:

“That was the first thing that came into my head. The legs were the legs of a twenty-year-old Vegas showgirl, a hundred feet long and with just enough curve and give and promise. Sure, there was no hiding the slightly worn hands or the beginning tugs of skin framing the bones in her face. But the legs, they lasted, I tell you. They endured. Two decades her junior, my skinny matchsticks were no competition.“

In 2008, The Queenpin won both the Edgar Award and the Barry Award for Best Paperback Original.

Dare Me (2012)

The narrator is 16-year-old Addy Hanlon, a high school cheerleader who describes herself as having “hair like a long taffy pull and skin tight as a rubber band.“ She continued: “Sometimes you stand under the hot gush for so long, looking at your body, counting every bruise. Touching every tender place. Watching the swirl at your feet, the glitter spinning. Like a mermaid shedding her scales.“

The Ark Sakura (1984)

The entire opening paragraph piques our curiosity, but especially the final sentence. The narrator then goes on to advance the story in an intriguing way:

“My nickname is Pig—or Mole. I stand five feet eight inches tall, weigh two hundred and fifteen pounds, and have round shoulders and stumpy arms and legs. Once, hoping to make myself more inconspicuous, I took to wearing a long black raincoat—but any hope I might have had was swept away when I walked by the new city hall complex on the broad avenue leading up to the station. The city hall building is a black steel frame covered with black glass, like a great black mirror; you have to pass it to get to the train station. With that raincoat on, I looked like a whale calf that had lost its way, or a discarded football, blackened from lying in the trash. Although the distorted reflection of my surroundings was amusing, my own twisted image seemed merely pitiful.“

The narrator’s use of rich, vivid detail is a hint of things to come. In a 1988 New York Times review, Edmund White wrote about the book: “It is a wildly improbable fable when recalled, but it proceeds with fiendishly detailed verisimilitude when experienced from within. For instance, the hollowed-out interior of the mountain is so well described that by the end of the book the reader is capable of drawing a map of its intricate corridors and chambers, its booby traps and depots—and especially its high-suction toilet that has the talismanic force of a coffin.“

A Man of the People (1966)

The narrator is Odili Samalu, an idealistic school teacher in a fictional African country resembling post-colonial Nigeria. About Samalu, John Day wrote in a 1966 Time magazine review: “He is, in fact, perhaps the most engaging character in fiction about Africa since the hero of Joyce Cary’s Mister Johnson, who was factotum to a white colonial official.“ From the outset, the phrase they would tell you seems significant—and that proves to be the case as the story unfolds.

Eight White Nights (2010)

This is a tour de force of an opening sentence, all 170 words of it. Opening sentences of 100-plus words are rare because they’re so exceptionally difficult to pull off. But when they’re crafted at a high artistic level, as we see here, they are to be treasured. When I first came across this gem from Aciman, one of our greatest contemporary writers, my thoughts immediately went to John Barth, who famously observed: “In art as in lovemaking, heartfelt ineptitude has its appeal and so does heartless skill, but what you want is passionate virtuosity.“

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy [book one in The Hitchiker’s Guide series] (1979)

In the first paragraph, the narrator continued: “Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.“

In the novel’s second paragraph, the narrator went on: “This planet has—or rather had—a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper....“

The Restaurant At the End of the Universe [book 2 in The Hitchiker’s Guide series] (1980)

These are the first words of Chapter 1, and it’s hard to imagine a better way to begin the book.

The first words of a brief Preamble to the book are also beautifully expressed: “There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another which states that this has already happened.“

The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (1988)

If you can begin a novel with an observation that has every chance of becoming a world-class quotation, you’re off to a great start—and that’s exactly what happened with this first sentence (all of the major quotation anthologies quickly picked it up).

In the novel’s second paragraph, the narrator continued: “Airports are ugly. Some are very ugly. Some attain a degree of ugliness that can only be the result of a special effort. This ugliness arises because airports are full of people who are tired, cross, and have just discovered that their luggage has landed in Murmansk.“

Chain-Gang All-Stars (2023)

The opening words come from Loretta Thurwar, a black female convict who is about to appear on “Chain-Gang All-Stars,” a wildly popular television show in which inmates in America’s private prison industry compete in gladiator-style death-matches for the ultimate prize: an unconditional release from prison.

This dramatic first sentence was brought to my attention by Washington Post book critic Ron Charles, who described it as “a knock-out.” He went on to add:

“With this short, arresting line, Adjei-Brenyah manages to immediately convey the deadly plot of this novel, but he also telescopes the story’s most profound theme about the condition of being watched, of being turned into a media object.”

Adjei-Brenyah’s novel went on to be named a finalist for the National Book Award.

Changes: A Love Story (1993)

The protagonist is Esi Sekyl, a highly educated, career-oriented data analyst in Ghana’s Department of Urban Statistics. Deeply unhappy in her marriage, she has no clue that this unplanned trip to the Linga HideAways Travel Agency—and chance meeting with the agency’s owner—will change her life.

Esi continued: “In spite of how strongly she felt about it all, why couldn’t she ever prevent her colleagues from assuming that any time the office secretary was away, she could do the job? And, better still, why couldn’t she prevent herself from falling into that trap?“

Great Circle (1933)

These are the cautionary inner reflections of the protagonist, Andrew Cather, who is on a train from New York City to Boston. He will be returning home three days early, and is not sure what he will find when he arrives (one possibility—both feared and, in some ways, desired—is that his wife will be in the arms of a lover).

Aiken was deeply interested in psychoanalysis, and this early psychological suspense novel was believed to be one of Sigmund Freud’s favorite novels.

American Dervish (2012)

The “it” was the moment protagonist Hayat Shah had his very first taste of pork (the son of Pakistani immigrants, he was at a college basketball game with friends when a food vendor mistakenly gave him a bratwurst instead of the beef hot dog he ordered). That bite set in motion a series of life-altering decisions that went on to change everything for Shah in this coming-of-age tale set in 1980s Wisconsin.

Generations of Winter (1994)

The opening words of the novel—which the Washington Post called “the 20th-century equivalent of War and Peace“—describe a scene unimagined several years earlier, when famine and epidemics had almost completely paralyzed the post-czarist country that was becoming known as “Russia of the Reds.“

The Five People You Meet in Heaven (2003)

For One More Day (2006)

The First Phone Call From Heaven (2013)

Albom clearly knows how to write a great first sentence, but he’s also adept at writing a compelling first page. Here’s how he continued after the opening sentence:

Drrrnnn!

She ignored the ring and dug her nails into the plastic.

Drrrnnn!

She clawed her forefinger through the bumpy part of the side.

Drrrnnn!

Finally, she made a rip, then peeled off the wrapping and scrunched it in her palm. She knew the phone would go to answering machine if she didn’t grab it one more—

Drrrnnn!

“Hello?“

Too late.

“Ach, this thing,“ she mumbled. She heard the machine click on her kitchen counter as it played her outgoing message.

“Hi, it’s Tess. Leave your name and number. I’ll get back to you as soon as I can, thanks.“

A small beep sounded. Tess heard static. And then.

“It’s Mom...I need to tell you something.“

Tess stopped breathing. The receiver fell from her fingers.

Her mother died four years ago.

A Place to Hang the Moon (2021)

In her debut novel, Albus had her narrator continue: “He was intent on the iced buns. Some of them had gone squashy on one side or the other, some had lost their icing when a neighboring bun had been removed, and a few had been sadly neglected in the icing department from the start.”

As the opening paragraph continued, the narrator neatly captured additional age-appropriate behavior for an eleven-year-old boy: “Undaunted, Edmund picked through the pile, finding two that met with his approval. He shoved one into each of his trouser pockets and, scooping up a handful of custard cream cookies to round out the meal, navigated through the crowd until he found a vacant armchair. There he settled, quite content despite the occasion. It helped that he’d never cared much for his grandmother, anyway.”

Little Women (1868)

The first four lines of Alcott’s debut novel introduce us to all four March sisters—and provide a glimpse of what we are to learn about each of them as the story unfolds.

Eight Cousins: or The Aunt-Hill (1875)

This has long been one of my favorite opening lines—mainly because it is such a fabulous metaphor. Over the years, whenever the subject of someone’s potential crying comes up, I’ve been inclined to say, “To piggyback on a line from Louisa May Alcott, ‘A shower is expected.’”

Chromos (1990)

This simple opening sentence can be appreciated at so many different levels—all of them interesting, and all of them highly relevant to the immigrant experience. In their 2006 listing of the “100 Best First Lines from Novels,“ the folks at the American Book Review ranked it number 41.

Written in the 1940s, but not published until 1990, Chromos anticipated many of the later immigrant narratives that would become so important in American fiction. The book came from out of nowhere to be nominated for the 1990 National Book Award, and is now regarded as a masterpiece of metafiction.

The Man with the Golden Arm (1949)

A Walk on the Wild Side (1956)

The Wind Knows My Name (2023)

Allende has penned some exceptional openers in her career, and this one nicely plants the idea that something is amiss in Rudolph Adler’s world—and has been for some time now. For savvy readers, the Vienna location and “November 1938” date provides an unsettling clue. In the novel’s third paragraph, the narrator continued:

“The stench of fear, like rust and rotting garbage, clung to his nostrils; neither his pipe tobacco nor his citrus-scented aftershave lotion could mask it. That afternoon, the stink of dread stirred up by the wind was suffocating, making him feel dizzy and nauseous. He decided to turn away the patients left in his waiting room and close up early. Surprised, his assistant asked if he was ill. She’d worked with the doctor for eleven years and had never known him to shirk his duties; he was a punctual, methodical man.”

For a number of openers from Allende’s nonfiction works, start here.

Police at the Funeral (1931)

The narrator continued: “There were at least four people who realized that Inspector Stanislaus Oates, only lately promoted to the Big Five, was being followed down High Holborn by the short, squat, shabby man who yet bore the elusive air of a forgotten culture about him.“

Cavedweller (1998)

This is the dramatic opening to an ambitious and absorbing story about Delia Byrd, a California rock-and-roll singer who decides to return to her childhood home in Georgia after her second husband has died in a horrifying motorcycle crash. Accompanied by their daughter, Cissy, she is also hoping to reunite with two older daughters she abandoned years earlier when, feeling she had no other options, she escaped from a verbally and physically abusive first marriage.

It is a common misconception that great opening lines are restricted to only a single, first sentence. The opening sentence of Cavedweller is a nice specimen, but think about what would be missing if this compilation had stopped after “Death changes everything.“

Kinflicks (1976)

The opening words of this modern American classic come from Ginny Babcock, a teenage girl growing up in a privileged white family in Tennessee. She continued: “My father, the Major, used to insist on having an ice pick next to his placemat at meals so that he could perform an emergency tracheotomy when one of us strangled on a piece of meat. Even now, by running my index fingers along my collarbones to the indentation where the bones join, I can locate the optimal site for a tracheal puncture with the same deftness as a junky a vein.”

In a Time magazine review, Paul Gray described the book as “abundantly entertaining,” and wrote about it: “The novel proves again—if any doubters still remain—that women can write about physical functions just as frankly and, when the genes move them, as raunchily as men. It strikes a blow for the picara by putting a heroine through the same paces that once animated a Tom Jones or a Holden Caulfield. And it suggests that life seen from what was once called the distaff side suspiciously resembles the genitalia-centered existence that male novelists have so long monopolized. The organs are different; the scoring is the same.” [NOTE: In his review, Gray’s unusual use of the word picara was a reference to the lovable rogues featured in picaresque novels]

The Rachel Papers (1973)

Readers who take the bait in the opening sentence are quickly reeled in as the narrator continues: “It’s such a rangy, well-traveled, big-cocked name and, to look at, I am none of these. I wear glasses for a start, have done since I was nine. And my medium-length, arseless waistless figure, corrugated rib-cage and bandy legs gang up to dispel any hint of aplomb.“

Feed (2002)

This delightful opening line suggests that teenagers will always have their own special argot, even in the dystopian future. The words come from a shallow, fun-loving teenager known only as Titus. After a disappointing trip to the moon, the “feed” going into his brain begins to malfunction—and the temporary absence of spoon-fed information from corporate controllers reawakens a questioning attitude that has been almost completely extinguished.

In a 2007 NPR blog post “Great Opening Lines to Hook Young Readers,” Nancy Pearl wrote: “Who could resist the first line of the chillingly satirical Feed by M. T. Anderson?” She went on to add: “That line sets the stage for the plot of this futuristic world that’s become overrun with rampant consumerism. Computer chips are implanted in most babies at birth. There’s no need to go to school, since you can Google any information you might need; there’s no need to talk to anyone, since you can IM instantaneously. There’s certainly no need to think, especially since the banner ads that float through your mind tell you exactly what you need to buy, do, and be to join the “in” crowd. But what happens when someone hacks into the computer feed that everyone is receiving? This is a terrific choice for both teen and adult book discussion groups.”

Anderson’s cyberpunk novel was a finalist for the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature and went on to be included in Time magazine’s list of the “100 Best YA Books of All Time.”

Ninja Soccer Moms (2004)

These opening words—which won the 2005 Ross Thomas Award for Best First Line in a Mystery or Thriller—describe Samantha “Sam” Shaw, a soccer mom who got thoroughly pissed off when, after her husband’s unexpected death, she discovered not only that he was cheating on her but that almost everybody knew about it.

I’ve been searching—without much success—for more information about the Ross Thomas Prize for Best First Line. I did find one other mention of the contest (see the Laura Lippman entry here), but nothing else. If you can provide any information, I’d be grateful.

The One and Only Bob (2020)

This is a sequel to The One and Only Ivan, Applegate’s wonderful 2012 children’s novel about a talking gorilla, and, if anything, it is even better. For reasons I’m not sure I completely understand, I absolutely love books narrated by talking animals, and this one starts off with a fabulous opening line. On the rest of the first page, Bob truly finds his “voice” as he continues:

“I bark at empty air. I eat cat litter. I roll in garbage to enhance my aroma.

“I harass innocent squirrels. I hog the couch. I lick myself in the presence of company.

“I’m no saint, okay?”

And so it goes—with a staccato-like delivery style that would be the envy of a stand-up comic—for 340 pages of one of the best animal-narrated stories I’ve ever read.

Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less (1976)

These are the memorable opening words to the book that launched Archer’s spectacular writing career. In the debut novel, the narrator continued:

“Henryk Metelski was one of those rare men who had managed all three. Even if the million he had made legally came after the million he had made illegally, Metelski was still a yard ahead of the others; he had managed to keep it all.“

After a financial scandal forced him to give up his political career in 1974 (he’d been a Member of Parliament since 1969), Archer was facing bankruptcy. He said to his wife, “The only way I can get out of this is to write my way out of it.“ And so he did. The novel became a bestseller, as did many of the three dozen other novels he would go on to write.

Kane & Abel (1979)

Kane & Abel was Archer’s second novel and, of the scores of books he went on to write, it was his most successful, selling nearly forty million copies (Wikipedia lists it as one of the 100 best-selling books of all time). In a 2017 article in Dubai’s Khaleej Times, Archer said: “If you’re going to open a book and you want to make people say, ‘I’m not going to put this down,’ you’re going to have to have a sensational opening sentence.” He went on to add that many people had written to him over the years saying Kane & Abel’s opening line “made it impossible not to go on reading.”

In the novel’s second paragraph, the narrator continued: “The young boy who was hunting rabbits in the forest was not sure whether it was the woman’s last cry or the child’s first that alerted his youthful ears. He turned suddenly, sensing the possible danger, his eyes searching for an animal that was so obviously in pain. He had never known any animal to scream in quite that way before.”

The Nazarene (1939)

The Apostle (1943)

I, Robot (1950)

The name of the encyclopedia immediately suggests a place that exists in the future. But where? And when? And how does it differ from the present day?

The Robots of Dawn (1983)

Nightfall (1990)

In only six simple words, we already know we have left earth and are about to have an out-of-this-world adventure

Black Buck (2021)

In this debut novel, which became an immediate New York Times bestseller, the narrator is a young, black, Bed-Stuy resident named Darren. On the surface, it’s a simple opening line, but it has a compelling subliminal message: When the day that changes our life finally arrives, we may not recognize it as all that significant because it will look just like all the other days. It was one of my choices for my Smerconish.com compilation of The Best Opening Lines of 2021 (see the post here).

In the first paragraph, Darren continued: “I suppose that makes it as important as a birthday, wedding, or bankruptcy, which is why I celebrate the twentieth of May every year like it’s my birthday. Why the hell not.“

In an “Author’s Note” at the beginning of the book, Askaripour also began memorably, writing: “There’s nothing like a Black man on a mission. No, let me revise that. There’s nothing like a Black salesman on a mission.“

Behind the Scenes at the Museum (1995)

The novel begins at the exact moment the narrator is conceived, and it captures precise details, including key aspects of her parents’ lovemaking patterns. The narrator, who will ultimately be known as Ruby Lennox, continued in the first paragraph: “At the moment at which I moved from nothingness into being my mother was pretending to sleep—as she often does at such moments. My father, however, is made of stern stuff and he didn’t let that put him off.”

Atkinson’s brilliant opening had a vague, but familiar feeling about it, but I couldn’t put my finger on the reason why until I read what she wrote in her Introduction to the 25th Anniversary edition of the book: “The beginning of the book is a nod to Tristram Shandy.” She went on to add that her novel—like Sterne’s classic work and, indeed, all of literature—is “about the journey of the self toward the light.”

Behind the Scenes at the Museum was Atkinson’s debut novel, and what a way to start a career. It won the 1995 Whitbread Book of the Year award and is now regarded as a modern classic.

The Handmaid’s Tale (1985)

In a 2011 blog, the English writer Kit Whitfield wrote: “Typical of Atwood, her first sentence begins at once lucidly simple and loaded with implications. It’s a sentence that aches with time.“

The narrator of tale, a handmaid known as Offred, continued: “The floor was of varnished wood, with stripes and circles painted on it, for the games that were formerly played there; the hoops for the basketball nets were still in place, though the nets were gone. A balcony ran around the room, for the spectators, and I thought I could smell, faintly like an afterimage, the pungent scent of sweat, shot through with the sweet taint of chewing gum and perfume from the watching girls, felt-skirted as I knew from pictures, later in mini-skirts, then pants, then in one earring, spiky green-streaked hair.“

Among its numerous awards, Atwood’s powerful dystopian novel won Canada’s most prestigious literary prize, the Governor General’s Literary Award in 1985. In 2017, Hulu adapted the novel into a ten-episode streaming series, with Elizabeth Moss starring as Offred. After the first season, the series received 13 Primetime Emmy nominations, winning eight, including Outstanding Drama Series and Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series. The series continues to be Hulu’s most popular offering, and is now in its fifth season.

Cat's Eye (1988)

The narrator and protagonist is middle-aged painter Elaine Risley, who's been invited back to her childhood home of Toronto for a retrospective exhibition of her work. She opens with a thought she first learned from her brother Stephen, after which she begins to regain long-forgotten memories of her youth.

In a 2011 Lit Reactor article, Meredith Borders wrote: "The line is lovely in its simplicity, and more to the point, piercingly accurate. What is a book if not a bridge across the dimension of time, allowing one to revisit the past and envision the future? Elaine recalls with exquisite clarity the days of her childhood, the pain of youthful rejection, and the delicate pride of finally embracing her sense of self."

The Blind Assassin (2000)

The opening words come from Iris Chase, an elderly woman who is reflecting on the death of her younger sister in 1945, at age twenty-five. At her death, Laura left behind a sci-fi novel titled The Blind Assassin, which went on to become a posthumous cult classic. Atwood’s complex, multi-layered, novel-within-a novel was panned by many critics, but went on to win numerous awards, including the 2000 Booker Prize.

Oryx and Crake (2003)

The Heart Goes Last (2015)

The Testaments (2019)

The Embezzler (1966)

The opening words come from Guy Prime, a fictionalized version of a real-life Wall Street executive who was at the center of a major financial scandal in the 1920s. In the opening paragraph of the novel, which was named a National Book Award finalist, he continued:

“In this year 1960, perhaps not every schoolchild (for what do they know of America’s past?) but surely every college man who has taken even a casual course in current history knows of Guy Prime. I am a symbol of financial iniquity, of betrayal of trust, of the rot in old Wall Street before the cleansing hose of the New Deal. If I had not existed, Franklin Roosevelt (who had a far more devious soul than mine) would have had to create me.”

Pride and Prejudice (1813)

Described by English writer and editor Robert McCrum as “The archetypal First Line for an archetypal tale,“ these opening words have achieved legendary status, appearing near the top of almost every Top Ten list ever compiled.

In How to Read Literature (2013), British scholar Terry Eagleton described this line as “One of the most renowned opening sentences in English literature” and “a small masterpiece of irony.“ Eagleton went on to add: “The irony does not exactly leap off the page. It lies in the difference between what is said—that everyone agrees that rich men need wives—and what is plainly meant, which is that this assumption is mostly to be found among unmarried women in search of a well-heeled husband.“

In the novel, the narrator continued: “However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighborhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.“

Over the years, Austen’s opening line has been tweaked many times. For some exceptional examples, see the entries by Erin Blakemore, Meghan O’Rourke, Alexandra Petri, and Curtis Sittenfeld.

Emma (1815)

Northanger Abbey (1817)

City of Glass [Book 1 of The New York Trilogy] (1985)

The narrator continued in the opening paragraph: “Much later, when he was able to think about the things that happened to him, he would conclude that nothing was real except chance. But that was much later. In the beginning, there was simply the event and its consequences. Whether it might have turned out differently, or whether it was all predetermined with the first word that came from the stranger’s mouth, is not the question. The question is the story itself, and whether or not it means something is not for the story to tell.”

In a 2017 blog post (“Superb First Paragraphs Can Teach Writers”), writer and editor John Fox wrote: “Love that this starts with a telephone ringing, and that the person calling is not asking for him. By withholding such information, Auster creates a fantastic mystery. And the rest of the paragraph emphasizes how pivotal this phone call was, and also introduces the notion about the meaning of narrative and story, which the rest of this novel will concentrate on.”

In his post, Fox continued: “Remember that the one and only true rule for the first paragraph is that it has to make the reader want to read the rest of the book. And Auster certainly accomplishes that here.”

Mr. Vertigo (1994)

This arresting opening line comes from Walt Rawley, a St. Louis orphan who, at age nine, was rescued from the streets by a mysterious circus performer named Master Yehudi. Set in the 1920s, Yehudi brings Walt into a Kansas circus troupe filled with colorful, larger-than-life characters, and, after learning how to levitate, the former street urchin achieves fame as “Walt the Wonder Boy.” In the opening paragraph, the picaresque protagonist further piques the reader’s interest by saying:

“The man in the black clothes taught me how to do it, and I’m not going to pretend I learned the trick overnight. Master Yehudi found me when I was nine, an orphan boy begging nickels on the streets of Saint Louis, and he worked with me steadily for three years before he let me show my stuff in public. That was in 1927, the year of Babe Ruth and Charles Lindbergh, the precise year when night began to fall on the world forever. I kept it up until a few days before the October crash, and what I did was greater than anything those two gents could have dreamed of. I did what no American had done before me, what no one has ever done since.”

Timbuktu: A Novel (1999)

The opening paragraph gets off to a terrific start, and continues like this for a full 270 words, as the character named Mr. Bones describes—with great concern—the deteriorating condition of someone who is very, very dear to him.

In the novel’s second paragraph, the story takes a dramatic turn as we learn that Mr. Bones is a dog. The narrator continued: “What was a poor dog to do? Mr. Bones had been with Willy since his earliest days as a pup, and by now it was next to impossible for him to imagine a world that did not have his master in it.”

Willy, a homeless man who lives in Brooklyn, is also concerned about the fate of Mr. Bones in a Willy-less world, and the two characters soon embark on a journey to rectify the situation. It’s a compelling novel, and a few years ago, I was delighted to learn that it was a personal favorite of celebrity librarian Nancy Pearl.

In a 2006 piece she did for National Public Radio, Ms. Pearl wrote: “Mr. Bones narrates the story of his life with Willy G. Christmas, which began when Mr. Bones was a pup and Willy was Willy Gurevitch, the brilliant son of Polish refugees. Now, Willy and Mr. Bones are on a search for Willy’s old high school English teacher, perhaps the only person who recognized Willy’s poetic gift. But it’s likely that Willy is going to die soon, and although Mr. Bones is pretty sure he knows what happens when people die—Willy has told him often enough that they go to Timbuktu—he’s not quite sure that dogs can go there too. And if not, where would he be without Willy? This novel, both like and unlike anything else that Auster has written, introduces two unforgettable characters.”

Tuck Everlasting (1975)

These are the opening words of the Prologue to the book. The narrator continued ominously: “It is curiously silent, too, with blank white dawns and glaring noons, and sunsets smeared with too much color. Often at night there is lightning, but it quivers all alone. There is no thunder, no relieving rain. These are strange and breathless days, the dog days, when people are led to do things they are sure to be sorry for after.”

In a 2016 blog post on “What Makes a Great First Line,” literary agent Amanda Luedeke wrote: “The first line from Tuck Everlasting ...doesn’t do much in the way of drawing the reader into the action–it actually goes out of its way to describe a notable lack of activity–but it serves as an example of another effective function of an opening sentence: laying a foundation.”

Luedeke went on to write that “Babbitt paints a quick picture of a certain time of year, evoking the weather (probably hot) and the pace of life (slow) at the moment the story opens, and we absorb these details and are primed to interpret the characters and events to come...without her having to explain everything...right up front.”

Beartown: A Novel (2017)

In a “Literary Lifestyle” blog post, Jules Buono wrote: “Beartown begins at the end and, with an opening line as ominous as this one, you just know there’s an epic tale to be unraveled.” The opening words form the entirety of the first chapter, and it’s impossible to imagine someone reading them and not immediately turning the page to learn more.

While the opening words suggest a crime novel, Beartown is regarded as a “sports novel,” often described as “the hockey version of Friday Night Lights.” In a New York Times review, however, book editor Gregory Cowles accurately titled his piece, “A Different Kind of Sports Novel.” Cowles also paid a high compliment to the author, writing, “As popular Swedish exports go, Backman is up there with Abba and Stieg Larsson.”

Anxious People (2020)

On its own, this is a wonderful opening paragraph—especially the final line—but the second paragraph is even better. It begins with the narrator breaking the fourth wall by speaking directly to the reader: “This story is about a lot of things, but mostly about idiots.”

This is a killer line, in my opinion, and I quite literally paused in my reading to savor it before reading on. The narrator then continued: “So it needs saying from the outset that it’s always very easy to declare that other people are idiots, but only if you forget how idiotically difficult being human is. Especially if you have other people you’re trying to be a reasonably good human being for.”

Like his previous novels, Anxious People became an immediate New York Times Best Seller and was quickly adapted into a six-part Netflix mini-series that premiered in the final days of 2021.

National Velvet (1935)

The narrator continued: “At night when the stars rose over them they looked like a starlit herd of divine pigs. The villagers called them Hullocks.“

Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)

Another Country (1962)

The narrator is describing Rufus Scott, a young, black, gay New York man who is trying to make his way in a world that isn’t exactly cooperating with him. The entire first paragraph is a beautiful description of a dark and bleak existence, and the “caterpillar fingers” portion is disturbingly compelling. The narrator continued: “He was so tired, he had fallen so low, that he scarcely had the energy to be angry; nothing of his belonged to him any more.“

In a 2013 essay in Political Research Quarterly (“Socrates in a Different Key: James Baldwin and Race in America”), Joel Alden Schlosser wrote: “While Rufus has tried to escape the streets to the movies, he cannot elude the threat of violence—both in the film and in sexual predations. Tired, low, dispossessed: Rufus appears already beaten by the end of the novel’s first paragraph.“

Just Above My Head (1979)

The narrator, the brother of a famous black, homosexual musician named Arthur Montana, continued: “The telephone call did not go into these details, neither did the telegram: urgently demanding my arrival because my brother was dead.“

The Crow Road (1992)

This is widely regarded as one of the most celebrated “hooks” in Young Adult literature, but I would argue that it is one of the best opening lines in all of literature. Colin Falconer placed it No. 13 on his 2013 list of “The Best 43 Opening Lines in Novel Writing History,” wryly observing about it: “Hard not to be hooked after that. The day your grandmother explodes is always an important day.“

The opening words come from Prentice McHoan, a Scottish university student who returns home for his grandmother’s funeral (her death was the result of a forgotten pacemaker). In the novel, he continued: “I sat in the crematorium, listening to my Uncle Hamish quietly snoring in harmony to Bach’s Mass in B Minor, and I reflected that it always seemed to be death that drew me back to Gallanach.”

The Fly Strip (2016)

In this coming-of-age tale, set in the 1960s, the narrator and protagonist is a 17-year-old high school student with a memorable literary name—Weed Clapper—and a clear Holden Caulfield quality. He continued: “Since Ginzberg, Kerouac and all the beats smoke weed, I think my nickname gives me an air of sophistication. And it’s a dang sight better than ’Peaches.’“

Ancient Light (2012)

The narrator is Alexander Cleave, an aging actor who begins his twilight meditations on life with memories of an adolescent affair with a woman more than twice his age. He continued: “Love may be too strong a word but I do not know a weaker one that will apply. All this happened half a century ago. I was fifteen and Mrs. Gray was thirty-five.“

April in Spain: A Novel [Book 8 in the Quirke series] (2021)

Banville is a writer of serious literary novels (he won the Booker Prize for The Sea in 2005), but he has always had a soft spot in his heart for crime fiction. Most of his crime novels were penned under the name Benjamin Black, but he wrote this most recent one under his own name—and he began it in a way that is perfectly fitting for the genre. It was one of my choices for a Smerconish.com compilation of The Best Opening Lines of 2021 (see the post here).

In the novel’s opening paragraph, the narrator continued: “Maybe ‘liked’ wasn’t the right word. Nowadays he was paid to do it, and well paid. But money was never the motive, not really. Then what was? He had given a lot of thought to this question, on and off, over the years. He wasn’t a looney, and it wasn’t a sex thing, or anything sick like that—he was no psycho.”

In a 2014 Guardian interview, Banville surprised many when he revealed that he preferred his crime novels to his more serious literary works: “I certainly like the Benjamin Black books more than my Banville novels because they [the Banville novels] are attempts to be works of art [and] all I see are the flaws, the faults, the failures, places where I should have kept going to make a sentence better.”

The Maid of Maiden Lane: A Love Story (1900)

Yes, The Maid of Maiden Lane is a novel, and a love story at that. But it begins with a remarkable historical assessment of the state of the city—and the new American nation—shortly after the Revolutionary War had come to a successful end. The narrator continued: “Like a young giant ready to run a race, it stood on tiptoe, eager for adventure and discovery—sending ships to the ends of the world, and round the world, on messages of commerce and friendship, and encouraging with applause and rewards that wonderful spirit of scientific invention, which was the Epic of the youthful nation.“

Peter and Wendy (1911)

The son of a weaver, Barrie studied at the University of Edinburgh before moving to London in 1885 to pursue a writing career. In 1897, he befriended Arthur and Sylvia Llewelyn Davis, a London couple with three young sons, George, John, and Peter (they ultimately added two more boys to the mix). Barrie loved playing with the boys, and regaled them with many fanciful stories, including one in which Peter was a bird before he was born and, after his birth, retained the ability to fly.

In 1902, Barrie introduced the character of Peter Pan in his novel The Little White Bird, but it was only a minor role, and Peter never advanced beyond infancy. Two years later, he developed Peter into the character we all know today for the 1904 London stage production, “Peter Pan, the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up.“ The play was a spectacular success, and catapulted Barrie into worldwide celebrity.

In 1911, Peter Pan was already one of the world’s most famous fictional characters when Barrie extended the stage play into a full-blown novel titled Peter and Wendy. The novel’s opening line is now regarded as a classic in world literature. What is less well known, though, is how Barrie continued the first paragraph:

“They soon know that they will grow up, and the way Wendy knew was this. One day when she was two years old she was playing in a garden, and she plucked another flower and ran with it to her mother. I suppose she must have looked rather delightful, for Mrs. Darling put her hand to her heart and cried, ‘Oh, why can’t you remain like this forever!’ This was all that passed between them on the subject, but henceforth Wendy knew that she must grow up.”

Overkill [Book 2 of Agent Paul Richter series] (2016)

In a 2007 post on his “Gravetapping” blog, writer and reviewer Ben Bouldon wrote “This is one of the coolest openings I have read recently.” I agree. The first portion is starkly straightforward, and it ends with a haunting phrase that couldn’t be more removed from the usual sense of the word play.

In the novel’s second paragraph, the narrator continued: “Bizarrely, Rashid looked more like a caricature of an accountant than anything else—small and slight, hunched, with thick pebble-lensed glasses—but nobody smiled when he was around. He had learnt his trade in the back streets of Baghdad and Basra, and refined his skills working on Russian prisoners seized by the Afghans. The smell of death was on him.”

Never Happen to You [Book 3 in True Crime Junkies series] (2023)

A provocative opening paragraph like this will have readers asking for more, and the next three lines—laid out in three separate paragraphs—will “hook” them for good:

She should be used to being disciplined by now.

She tried not to make him mad. To do as he said.

But it seemed as if every day she failed to meet her captor’s expectations.

The Sot-Weed Factor (1960)

Whenever I hear writers opining that a novel’s opening words should be pithy and punchy, I think about the many brilliant opening sentences that stretch out to more than 100 words—as in this gem from one of the modern era’s most acclaimed writers.

Barth’s 119-word opening sentence dazzled the critics of his day, and continues to impress modern readers. In a 2010 Time magazine feature on “The 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005,” critic Richard Lacayo wrote:

“A feast. Dense, funny, endlessly inventive (and, OK, yes, long-winded) this satire of the 18th-century picaresque novel—think Fielding’s Tom Jones or Sterne’s Tristram Shandy—is…impossibly rich, a wickedly funny take on old English rhetoric and American self-appraisals.”

The Man Nobody Knows (1952)

This lovely, philosophical beginning has the flavor of an older, wiser person—a teacher or clergyman, perhaps—passing along time-honored wisdom. As the third paragraph begins, we begin to sense that the book is a fictionalized version of a very real historical figure. Reading on, we discover that Barton—one of the era’s most successful business executives—has reframed the life of Jesus, portraying him as a brilliant adman, a superb salesman, and a role model for businesspeople everywhere.

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900)

The opening words introduce us to the young, female protagonist, but provide no information about why she is living with relatives. They also provide a hint about what is to come: “There was no garret at all, and no cellar—except a small hole dug in the ground, called a cyclone cellar, where the family could go in case one of those great whirlwinds arose, mighty enough to crush any building in its path. It was reached by a trap-door in the middle of the floor, from which a ladder led down into the small, dark hole.“

Bored of the Rings: A Parody (1969)

In this brilliant Harvard Lampoon parody of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, the narrator continued: "She slipped off the flimsy garment and strode toward the fascinated biggie unashamed of her nakedness. She ran a perfect hand along his hairy toes, and he helplessly watched them curl with the fierce insistent wanting of her."

Dishing the Dirt (2015)

In a 2016 NovelSpaces.com post, mystery writer Susan Oleksiw wrote: “There are as many ways to open a story as there are storytellers, but all have the same goal, to pull the reader into the tale. The opening lines establish tone also, dark or light, humorous or not. The general rule is to establish a normal world that is upset, and the results of the ‘upset’ are the story.”

About Beaton’s opening words above, Oleksiw wrote: “This is a gentler lead-in but the promise is there. Into this bucolic world of natural beauty comes darkness, and a woman determined to combat crime.”

The Second Greatest Story Ever Told (1991)

This is the only novel I’ve seen that begins with a description of the birth of a baby, and the first words capture the event accurately and succinctly. The new-born is Ilona Ann Coggswater, who we will shortly learn is no ordinary baby, but the first daughter of God.

The narrator continued in the novel’s second paragraph: “And though the safety, comfort, warmth, and humidity of her mother’s womb seemed preferable to the glare and rubber gloves that now surrounded her, it was checkout time.”

Bechard is better known as an independent filmmaker and documentarian, but his debut novel demonstrated great talent at satirical writing. He also provided an intriguing epigraph to the first chapter—an updated version of John 3:17: “For God did not send His Daughter into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Her might be saved.”

The Hazmat Diary (1992)

This is the first entry in a diary found by a character named Anatole Laferriere III in 2099, over four decades after an apocalyptic American Revolution in 2058 resulted in the former superpower descending into Third World status. The diary, written by a 37-year-old bartender named Doc was one of a number of diaries found in a region of the country once known as New England. Originally planned as a follow-up to Bechard’s debut novel (The Second Greatest Story Ever Told), it became a groundbreaking, but little-read multi-media web-novel in the early days of broadband. It was reissued in print and electronic versions in 2010.

Good Neighbors (1997)

Ninth Square (2002)

The woman in question is Midori Strumski, a 19-year-old Yale University drama major with a thick dictionary in her hands. The first line immediately achieves its purpose, causing the reader to wonder, “What is the title, or the word? And what does this very specific situation mean?” The word, we shortly discover, is escort.

The narrator continued: “The thickest dictionary in Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library defined it as a noun in four different ways…. It was the last of these that she felt best fit. Guidance on a journey. Because, in a way, an escort’s job was to guide semen along on its journey out of the penis and into, or onto, whatever the customer’s pleasure.”

Murphy (1938)

In a 2018 post on CulturaColectiva.com, Zoralis Pérez included this opener in a compilation of “15 First Sentences from Classic Books That’ll Convince You to Read Them.” About the complete list, Pérez wrote:

“When it comes to choosing a new read, you should take into account every little piece of information you can get about it (after all, it’s a pretty big commitment) and the cover is your first impression of the story, so of course, it matters. However, even more important than the cover, it’s the first sentence. A book’s first sentence is like a first kiss or the first time you lock eyes with the person you love. It’s brief and sometimes a little strange, but if you like it, it’s the start of something great.”

Company (1980)

The Adventures of Augie March (1953)

In the novel, the protagonist continued in the first paragraph: “But a man’s character is his fate, says Heraclitus, and in the end there isn’t any way to disguise the nature of the knocks by acoustical work on the door or gloving the knuckles.“

As soon as it was published, this picaresque novel—Bellow’s third—was being recognized by fellow writers as something special. Delmore Schwartz hailed it as “a new kind of book.“ Martin Amis paid it the highest compliment of all: “The Great American Novel. Search no further.“ By the end of the year, the novel was almost a no-brainer to win the 1954 National Book Award for Fiction, and it put the author on a clear path that would ultimately lead to the 1976 Nobel Prize for Literature.

In a 2005 NPR essay, literary critic Alan Cheuse ranked the opening sentence right up there with the first sentences of Moby Dick and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Since those two works, Cheuse wrote, “no one but Bellow has fashioned an opening as memorable and as powerful and as important.“ He continued his rave with a memorable metaphor: “This line that sprung open the padlock of American art language by using the pick of free-style diction. This line that announced that American writers didn’t have to glove their knuckles anymore when they knocked at the door.“

Herzog (1964)

The novel’s first sentence introduces one of Bellow’s most famous characters, a 47-year-old academic who is currently experiencing a major mid-life crisis (In David Mikic’s 2016 biography Bellow’s People, he wrote that the “opening line rings with a desperate man’s strange wit”).

Humboldt’s Gift (1975)

The Other Einstein (2016)

Some books have a great opening line, others a great opening paragraph, and still others a great opening chapter—and that is the case with Benedict’s wonderful historical novel about Einstein’s first wife, Mileva “Mitza” Maric.

I’m only presenting the quite serviceable opening paragraph here, but I urge you to check out the entire first chapter. It will take you less than five minutes to read—and you won’t regret it. In a blurb for the book, writer Kathleen Tessaro (The Perfume Collector and more) wrote that Benedict’s novel “has the reader rooting for our heroine from the very first pages.”

The First Ladies (2023)

To be effective, a great opening doesn’t have to bowl you over, it just has to strike a responsive chord—and that’s exactly what happened when I began reading this book. In this case, the deal was completely sealed when I learned that the speaker was the legendary civil rights activist Mary McLeod Bethune and the person she was visiting that day was the future First Lady of the United States, Eleanor Roosevelt. In the opening paragraph, Bethune continued: “Not that it mattered to me. I have never been hindered by the views and prejudices of others, not even the Ku Klux Klan.”

The story is told in alternating chapters, with Bethune speaking in one, and Roosevelt in the other. Chapter Two begins this way:

New York, New York

October 14, 1927

Move, I tell myself. Walk across the room and offer your hand in welcome. But as I watch Mary McLeod Bethune stroll around the drawing room alone, I don’t break away from the conversation I’m having with the head of the American Association of University Women. The sight of the only colored woman in the room unnerves me, and I wonder about the wisdom of including the renowned educator in this national luncheon of women’s club heads. Were my mother-in-law and I naive to invite her?

The Mothers: A Novel (2016)

For me, this was a simple-but-irresistible first sentence, causing me to wonder, “What was the gossip, exactly?“ and “What made it hard to believe?“ Bennett’s debut novel, published in her mid-twenties, went on to become one of the year’s most acclaimed books, with words like “compelling,“ “striking,“ “brilliant” and “mesmerizing” being routinely tossed around. Bennett may have been new to the world of fiction, but few who were familiar with her previous essays and articles were surprised when the National Book Foundation put her on their “5 Under 35” list of promising debut novelists.

The Vanishing Half: A Novel (2020)

In the novel’s opening paragraph, the narrator continued: “The barely awake customers clamored around him, ten or so, although more would lie and say that they’d been there too, if only to pretend that this once, they’d witnessed something truly exciting.“

Bernadine Evaristo, author of the Booker Prize-winning Girl, Woman, Other summarized the reaction of many readers when she wrote: “The Vanishing Half is an utterly mesmerizing novel, which gripped me from the first word to the last.“ Bennett’s novel, her second, debuted at Number One on The New York Times Best-Seller List. A month later, she signed an HBO deal for a limited series, with her serving as the executive producer. It is currently in production.

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1994)

Berendt’s debut novel is often classified as a “non-fiction novel” (like Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood), because it was based on a real 1981 crime—the murder of a male prostitute by a respected antiques dealer in Savannah, Georgia (he was also the victim’s employer and lover).

The novel was a commercial and critical success, winning the 1995 Boeke Prize and named a finalist for the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction. In 1997, Clint Eastwood adapted the novel into a film (starring Kevin Spacey and John Cusack) that did wonders for Savannah’s tourist industry.

Talk Before Sleep (1994)

Great opening lines don’t necessarily bowl readers over, they simply provide subtle hints about what’s been happening and where the story is going. Another casserole? All I can manage? Her own family taking second priority to time at Ruth’s? Talk Before Sleep turns out to be a moving story about a friendship between protagonist Ann Stanley and her cancer-stricken friend Ruth Thomas.

Say When (2003)

The narrator, a happily (or so he thought) married man named Griffin, continued: “Six months ago, saying she needed a new direction in her life, saying she was tired of feeling helpless around anything mechanical, that she had no idea how to even change a tire. Ellen had taken a course in basic auto mechanics—’Know Your Car,’ it was called.“

The Story of Arthur Truluv (2017)

The narrator continued: “He rides the bus to the cemetery and when he gets there, he takes his sweet time walking over to her plot: she will be there no matter when he arrives. She will be there and be there and be there.“

Little Big Man (1964)

With these simple first words, the 111-year-old Jack Crabb—the only living survivor of Custer’s Last Stand—introduces himself. As he continues in the second paragraph, readers get their first glimpse of what the book holds in store for them: “My Pa had been a minister of the gospel in Evansville, Indiana. He didn’t have a regular church, but managed to talk some saloonkeeper into letting him use his place of [sic] a Sunday morning for services. Hoosier fourflushers on their way to New Orleans, pickpockets, bullyboys, whores, and suchlike, my Pa’s favorite type of congregation owing to the possibilities it afforded for the improvement of a number of mean skunks.“ Crabb, one of literary history’s most colorful characters, was brought to life in a spectacular way by Dustin Hoffman in a 1970 film adaptation of the book.

In a fascinating fourteen-page “Foreword by a Man of Letters,“ Berger’s narrator, a fictional writer named Ralph Fielding Snell, sets the stage for the novel by writing: “It was my privilege to know the late Jack Crabb—frontiersman, Indian Scout, gunfighter, buffalo hunter, adopted Cheyenne—in his final days upon this earth. An account of my association with this remarkable individual may not be out of order here, for there is good reason to believe that without my so to speak catalytic function these extraordinary memoirs would never have seen the light of day. This apparently immodest statement will, I trust, be justified by the ensuing paragraphs.“

The Return of Little Big Man (1999)

Crabb continued in the novel’s second paragraph: “Now I already give a detailed account of these and other episodes of my early life to a fellow name of Ralph Fielding Snell, who come to the old folks’ home back a few months, or years—when you’re old as me such distinctions don’t matter much; I happen to have just turned 112. Yeah, I don’t believe it either, but I’m the one that’s got to live with the fact.“

Dark Ride (2023)

The opening words come from narrator and protagonist Hardy Reed, a 21-year-old stoner who, standing in the middle of a city parking lot, loses his bearings while trying to find a municipal courthouse to process a traffic ticket. He continued with a series of reflections that can only be described as the kind of pot-induced ideation where even the most mundane aspects of life take on a cosmic significance:

“This parking lot, when you’re in the middle of it, seems much vaster and more expansive than it does from the street. Or do I just seem much less consequential? That’s the question. One for the ages.”

This delightful opening serves as a perfect set-up for an affable underachiever who has no clue his life is about to take a turn for the serious—the deadly serious—when he inadvertently discovers unmistakable signs of child abuse in two children sitting alone on a courthouse bench.

About the novel, writer Don Winslow wrote: “Dark Ride effortlessly grabs you and does not let you down until the final page.” I was delighted to honor Berney’s terrific opener in my Smerconish.com compilation of “23 of the Best Opening Lines of 2023” (see the full list here).

Murder Off the Books [Book 3 of the By the Book Mysteries] (2023)

A neat twist is always a good way to grab a reader’s attention—and this one nicely takes us from the grisly viewing of a corpse to a comical scene of a person struggling to play the role of one.

Dances with Wolves (1988)

The opening words attempt to capture the emotional experience of Union Army Lieutenant John Dunbar when, in the 1860s, he first witnessed the vastness of the American frontier, now known as The Great Plains. The narrator continued:

“Everything was immense.

“The great, cloudless sky. The rolling ocean of grass. Nothing else, no matter where he put his eyes. No road. No trace of ruts for the big wagon to follow. Just sheer, empty space.

“He was adrift. It made his heart jump in a strange and profound way.”

In 1990, the novel was adapted into a film directed by and starring Kevin Costner (it was his directorial debut). A critical as well as a commercial success, it was the fourth-highest grossing film of 1990. Nominated for 12 Academy Awards, it won seven (including Best Picture and Best Director). It also became the second Western in film history (after Cimarron in 1931) to win an Academy Award for Best Picture.

The Exorcist (1971)

So begins a novel that has become a classic in horror fiction: the story of the demonic possession—and subsequent exorcism—of an eleven-year-old girl. Blatty was a student at Georgetown University in 1949 when the campus was bristling with news of recent exorcism, and the story stayed with him, untold, until he finally put it together in fictional form twenty years after he graduated.

An immediate best-seller, the novel was adapted by William Friedkin into a 1973 film by the same title. Now regarded as one of the greatest horror films ever made, it was the first in the genre to be nominated for a Best Picture Academy Award (it received ten nominations, winning two, for Best Adapted Screenplay—written by Blatty, incidentaly—and Best Sound).

How to Love Your Daughter (2023)

In the opening sentence, our heartstrings have already been seriously tugged—and we will shortly learn the tragic backstory. A middle-aged woman is so estranged from her daughter that she has never been allowed to see her two granddaughters. In a desperate attempt to cope with this enormous loss, she goes to great pains to make sure her presence is not discovered as she surreptitiously attempts to catch a glimpse of the girls from afar.

In the novel’s opening paragraph, the narrator—who we will shortly discover is an Israeli woman named Yoella—continued:

“The windows in the suburban neighborhoods of Groningen hang large and low—I was embarrassed by how effortlessly I’d got what I’d come for, frightened by how easily they could be gobbled up by my gaze. But I, too, was exposed. The slightest turn of their heads and they would have seen me.”

In a New York Times book review, Flynn Berry described the book as “A stone-cold masterwork of psychological tension.“ I was pleased to include Ward’s exceptional opener in my compilation of “23 of the Best Opening Lines of 2023” on Smerconish.com (see the full list here).

A Very Private Gentleman: A Novel (2005)

Metaphorical openings—if they are well crafted—can be extremely effective, and this one is particularly impressive. As we read it, there’s a clear suggestion that, whatever the quality of the forthcoming tale, it will be very well told. In a 2010 blog post, writer and editor Alyssa Linn Palmer wrote: “I picked this book up at a friend’s place and with just the first line, I was hooked.”

The Bitter Past (2023)

These provocative opening words come from narrator and protagonist Porter Beck, the sheriff of Lincoln County, in the high desert of Nevada. Borgos’s debut novel was published to great praise from his fellow mystery writers. About it, Craig Johnson (author of the Longmire series of books) wrote: “A crisp jolt of cask-strength, 100-proof writing.”

The Dark Tower (1916)

A Servant of Reality (1919)

The opening words describe the novel’s protagonist, an English soldier who has finally found his freedom after two years in a WWI German POW camp. About him, the narrator continued:

“When he closed his eyes he escaped seeing the very fat, red neck, passing without gradation into the round-shaped head of his German guard.”

The Kingfisher (1922)

The novel begins with what can only be described as a sad reality—a child’s realization that there is something other than the insecurity he has experienced his entire young life, but, at the same time, feeling that a better life is somehow out of reach.

Bottome was a popular English writer who became a student as well as a patient of the legendary psychoanalyst, Alfred Adler. Her novels show a level of psychological sophistication well before the field of psychology ever took hold in England and America.

The Lifeline (1946)

By the simple insertion of the unexpected word disliked, the narrator not only gets our attention, but suggest that the protagonist may be a more complicated figure than he appears to be.

In the novel—Bottome’s only spy novel—Chalmers is a 36-year-old Eton College schoolmaster who is preparing for his annual climbing trip in the Austrian Alps. As the summer of 1938 approaches, Chalmers is asked by a friend in England’s Foreign Office to unobtrusively deliver a private message to a man living in Innsbruck. Chalmers is fully aware that an element of intrigue is involved. After all, the country was only recently annexed by Germany, and the Foreign Office’s offer to pay for his holiday expenses was a clear indication that some risk is involved in carrying out the assignment.

Her Royal Spyness [Book 1 of the Royal Spyness series] (2007)

Any opening sentence that arouses a reader’s curiosity has done its job, and this one does it very nicely—making readers immediately wonder what those two disadvantages are and heightening interest in a subject we don’t typically think about: minor royals. In the novel’s second paragraph, the narrator—a minor royal [34th in line for the English throne] named Lady Georgiana Rannoch—continued:

“First one is expected to behave as befits a member of the ruling family, without being given the means to do so. One is expected to kiss babies, open fetes, put in an appearance at Balmoral (suitably kilted), and carrying trains at weddings. Ordinary means of employment are frowned upon. One is not, for example, allowed to work on the cosmetics counter at Harrod’s, as I was about to find out.”

Proof of the Pudding [Book 17 of The Royal Spyness series] (2023)

The opening words come from narrator and protagonist Lady Georgiana Rannoch—know as Georgie to fans of the series. The first sentence immediately draws readers in as they predictably think, “So what arrival are you nervous about?”

In a starred review, Publishers Weekly described the book as “Whimsical,” adding, “Bowen successfully melds a whodunit with comedy as few contemporary writers can.”

Savage Run [Book 2 in The Joe Pickett Series] (2002)

Some great opening lines—and, indeed, even entire novels—begin with a single image that simply popped into an author’s mind, and that appears to be the case here. In a 2021 post on the “Writers in the Storm” Blog, Margie Lawson, a friend of the author, wrote: “Chuck had an idea about starting a book with an exploding cow. He didn’t want to lose it, so he named two characters and wrote that first sentence. He wrote the rest of the story three years later.”

In Plain Sight [Book 6 in The Joe Pickett Series] (2007)

In a 2007 post on his “Gravetapping” blog, writer and reviewer Ben Bouldon wrote: “This is one of the best opening lines I’ve read. It has everything. Bite. Mystery. Appeal. Humor—dark as it is. And it’s just damn intriguing…and oh how it makes me want to read on and on.”

The Road to Wellville (1993)

The narrator continued: “As was the audience, judging from the gasp that arose after she’d raised her hand, stood shakily and demanded to know what was so sinful about a good porterhouse steak—it had done for the pioneers, hadn’t it? And for her father and his father before him?“

The Heart’s Invisible Furies (2017)

In a 2017 book review in SFGate.com, writer and editor Alexis Burling called this a “whopper of an opening sentence.“ Writing more expansively on the novel’s dramatic opening, Viola Hayden of the Curtis Brown literary agency offered the following assessment in one of the firm’s 2020 blog posts:

“This is a sprawling opening sentence, but every part has earned its place. We meet our narrator—and a mysterious ’we’—and you get such a strong sense of their wry voice. This is clearly Ireland and that inimitable Irishness is captured and conveyed beautifully; it’s not quite contemporary (’long before’) but it’s rural, religious, hypocritical and vengeful. The word ’whore’ slaps you around the face when you reach it after being lulled into a comfortable meander by the litany of descriptions. And it changes your impression of the direction of the book—now you know our narrator likely has a poor opinion of the church, rather than of their mother. Overall, a belter.“

Fahrenheit 451 (1953)

This legendary opening line is loaded with ambiguity. Is the narrator himself burning, and finding pleasure in it? Or is he finding pleasure in burning something else? With these six simple words, we are immediately thrust into a dystopian future, where the narrator, a fireman named Guy Montag, finds pleasure in burning books that have been outlawed by government censors in an autocratic state (we also eventually learn that the title refers to the temperature at which books spontaneously erupt into flame).

The opening line of Fahrenheit 451 has been admired since the book was published, and for the past fifty years it’s been discussed in every creative writing class that has ever existed. One of my favorite comments appeared in a 2011 LitReactor article by Meredith Borders, where she explained why the beginning is so effective: “The sentence is made up of six words, elegant in their brevity and crushing in their implications. Fireman Guy Montag lives his entire life taking casual pleasure in government oppression—until a series of events leads him to look at his life and society with growing horror.“

Nurse Matilda (1964)

So begins the story of Nurse Matilda, a hideously ugly witch who mysteriously arrives at the household of the Brown family, which is beset by some of the naughtiest children in England. The book was very popular in Great Britain, and resulted in two sequels: Nurse Matilda Goes to Town (1967) and Nurse Matilda Goes to Hospital (1974). The opening paragraphs of the two sequels are worded slightly differently from the original novel, but they both end the same way: “...and all the children were terribly, terribly naughty.”

In 2005, the novels were loosely adapted into the film Nanny McPhee, starring Colin Firth and Emma Thompson (she also wrote the screenplay). In addition to a new name for the title character, there were some other changes as well, but the essential story remained the same—a nanny with magical powers arrives at an out-of-control home and transforms the life of a family being disrupted by some very naughty children. One other important thing from the novel also made it into the film, and I was delighted to see it retained. Let me explain.

I’m a longtime fan of the literary device known as chiasmus (pronounced ky-AZ-muss), and in 1999, I introduced it to popular culture in my book Never Let a Fool Kiss You or a Kiss Fool You. Brand’s 1964 novel contains a wonderful example. Describing her approach to caring for children, Nurse Matilda says: “When my children don’t want me, but do need me: then I must stay. When they no longer need me, but they do want me: then I have to go.”

When I heard about the film coming out, I eagerly awaited its appearance, wondering if this very special observation would be included. Happily, with a slight change in wording, it did. In an early scene, when Nanny McPhee first meets the seven children, she says to them: “When you need me, but do not want me, then I will stay. If you want me, but no longer need me, then I have to go.” A hearty thanks to the literate Emma Thompson for including the chiastic sentiment in her screenplay.

A Confederate General from Big Sur (1965)

There’s nothing like the assertion of a historical impossibility to arrest a reader’s attention, and Brautigan does that very nicely in the opening sentence of his debut novel, published when he was twenty-eight. In the novel, Brautigan—a popular San Francisco street poet in the early days of the “hippie” movement—tells the story of Lee Mellon, an alienated and often delusional California man who believes he is a descendant of a heroic Confederate general from Big Sur, California. In the opening paragraph, the narrator continued:

“I had always thought that Georgia, Arkansas, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, South Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Texas were the Confederacy and let it go at that. I had no idea that Big Sur was also a member.”

A critical and commercial failure after it was published, the novel soon went out of print. It was re-issued two years later—after the success of Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America (1967)—and is now regarded as a counter-culture classic.

Sombrero Fallout (1976)

As the book opens, this entire passage is presented in quotation makes, and we quickly surmise that it is the opening paragraph of a novel the author is currently writing. As the story unfolds, Brautigan does something I’ve never before seen in literary fiction. Here’s how Eric Lorberer, editor of The Rain Taxi Review of Books, described it in a Fall, 2000 essay:

“As the novel opens, a writer is writing a novel, gets discouraged, and throws the opening lines in the trash. While one track of the novel chronicles the next hour in the writer’s life, the other follows the discarded lines, which ‘decided to go on without him.”

The Postman (1985)

The narrator is describing the mind of protagonist Gordon Krantz, a wandering apocalypse survivor who, after losing everything to bandits, stumbles upon a United States Postal Service uniform. He originally dons the uniform solely for warmth, but eventually decides it will be helpful in his attempt to build faith in a “restored” United States of America. In the opening paragraph, the narrator continued:

“After half a lifetime in the wilderness, most of it spent struggling to survive, it still struck Gordon as odd—how obscure memories would pop into his mind right in the middle of a life-or-death fight.“

Critics began hailing Brin’s novel from the day it was published, and it went on to win the 1986 Locus Award for Best Science Fiction novel. The tale was brought to the big screen in a 1997 film adaptation, with a memorable performance by Kevin Costner.

Agnes Grey (1847)

These opening words from English governess Agnes Grey are among the most beautiful ever written on an important question: what can we learn from an analysis of our past? As she continues, there is a tantalizing suggestion that some of her own personal choices might have been questionable: “Whether this be the case with my history or not, I am hardly competent to judge; I sometimes think it might prove useful to some, and entertaining to others, but the world may judge for itself: shielded by my own obscurity, and by the lapse of years, and a few fictitious names, I do not fear to venture, and will candidly lay before the public what I would not disclose to the most intimate friend.“

Jane Eyre (1847)

When many readers think of Jane Eyre, their minds go to the legendary closing line (“Reader, I married him”), but the novel’s opening line has also been admired by many for its subtle, straight-to-the-point strength. In The 100 Best Novels in English (2015), Robert McCrum called Brontë’s opener “a haunting first line” that “takes her audience by the throat with a fierce narrative of great immediacy.”

In a 2011 blog post, English writer Kit Whitfield wrote: “Some books begin with a flourish, others with a handshake. Jane Eyre occupies the former category: the opening sentence, rather than being a standalone moment, is the beginning of a discursive paragraph deftly bringing in landscape, weather and social frictions, all major themes throughout the book. But the first sentence, flexible and authoritative, quickly establishes the voice of the narrator.”

And, finally, in a 2019 BBC.com “Culture” post (“What Are the Best First Lines in Fiction?”) Hephzibah Anderson wrote about the opening line: “As sentences go, its charms are discreet to say the least. And yet those 10 words, as anyone who returns to them having reached the novel’s end, capture so much about its eponymous heroine’s character—her low expectations, her bottomless capacity for disappointment.”

The Debut (1981)

In a chapter titled “Lines That Linger; Sentences That Stick” in More Book Lust (2005), celebrity librarian Nancy Pearl described this as one of her favorite opening lines. About it, she wrote: “A line that every compulsive middle-aged reader can identify with.“

In the novel, the narrator continued about Dr. Weiss: “In her thoughtful and academic way, she put it down to her faulty moral education, which dictated, through the conflicting but in this one instance united agencies of her mother and father, that she ponder the careers of Anna Karenina and Emma Bovary, but that she emulate those of David Copperfield and Little Dorrit.“

Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague (2001)

It is apple-picking time in the harvest season of 1666 and, after only six words, we’re wondering what happened—and already know it must have been bad.

March (2005)

The opening words come from Mr. March, a Union Army chaplain who is reflecting on a letter he is writing to his wife back home in Concord, Massachusetts. A moment later in the letter, he specifically references his daughter Jo—an aspiring writer—in a thought that references all four of his daughters: “I hope my dear young author is finding time amid all her many good works to make use of my little den, and that her friendly rats will not grudge a short absence from her accustomed aerie.“

If any of this sounds familiar, it’s because Brooks got her inspiration for the book from Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868). The title of the novel refers to the four March sisters, who are living with their mother in the family home while their father is serving as a chaplain in the Union Army. Though physically absent, Mr. March maintains a presence in their lives through his frequent letters home. In one passage that particularly struck Brooks, Alcott wrote: “Jo said sadly, ’We haven’t got father, and shall not have him for a long time.’ She didn’t say ’perhaps never,’ but each silently added it, thinking of father far away, where the fighting was.“ March got mixed reviews from critics, but was devoured by Brooks’s fans, went on to become a bestseller, and was awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

The Way to Bright Star (1998)

The words come from Ben Butterfield, an aging ex-circus performer who is living and working in a small Midwestern town in 1902. As he opens the shoe box, he does not yet realize that the old photographs will be stimulating a flood of memories about an amazing coming-of-age odyssey from forty years earlier.

Butterfield continued: “I just now found my favorite, the one of Queen Elizabeth Jones, of course, and there she is—in her white riding tights, her golden hair done up halo style, her lips parted in the joyful smile that is like none I’ve ever seen on any other human being’s face.“

The Sailor Dog (1953)

In Nonfiction Matters, her 1998 book for young readers, writer Stephanie Harvey wrote: “These words churned in my mind throughout childhood. I return to Margaret Wise Brown’s The Sailor Dog time and time again because of that first line.”

Rubyfruit Jungle (1973)

The opening words come from Molly Bolt, perhaps the first larger-than-life lesbian protagonist in American literature. She continued: “I didn’t know anything about my own beginnings until I was seven years old, living in Coffee Hollow, a rural dot outside of York, Pennsylvania. A dirt road connected tarpapered houses filled with smear-faced kids and the air was always thick with the smell of coffee beans freshly ground in the small shop that gave the place its name. One of those smear-faced kids was Brockhurst Detwiler, Broccoli for short. It was through him that I learned I was a bastard. Broccoli didn’t know I was a bastard but he and I struck a bargain that cost me my ignorance.“

In Her Day (1976)

In this opening scene, we’re introduced to Carole Hanratty, a 44-year-old art history professor. All her life, Hanratty has believed that rationality transcends emotion—and then she meets Ilse, a young, revolutionary feminist.

Six of One (1978)

High Hearts (1986)

This is an okay opening line, but not a particularly memorable one. I include it here because Brown’s opening line in the book’s Foreword is sensational: “Novels, like human beings, usually have their beginnings in the dark.“

Venus Envy (1993)

This whistling past the graveyard reflection comes from 35-year-old Frazier Armstrong, an art gallery owner who has learned that her lung cancer is so advanced she has only a short while to live.

The opening paragraph continued: “Frazier Armstrong breathed deeply, which wasn’t easy, since the oxygen tube stuck down her throat had rubbed it raw. ’Then again, I never will have to fill out the IRS long form, buy a county sticker for my car, be burdened with insurance payments that stretch into eternity, to say nothing of my business license and the damned money I pay to the county each year on my depreciating business machines. No more mortgage payments and no more vile temptation as the doors of Tiffany’s yawn at me like the very gates of hell.’“

Brown then found a way to recycle a famous Oscar Wilde quip as her narrator continued about the dying patient: “She burrowed ever deeper into the hospital bed. Porthault sheets brought from home made the bed more comfortable but every time she glanced at the saccharine wallpaper, a dusty rose with tiny little bouquets, she thought, ’One of us has to go.’“

Loose Lips (1999)

Alma Mater (2001)

The opening words come from Victoria “Vic” Savedge, a striking, six-foot-tall, raven-haired beauty beginning her senior year at William & Mary College. As the novel begins, she has no idea that her longtime plans to marry the scion of one of Virginia’s most prominent families will soon be upended when she meets a new transfer student from Vermont, a young woman named Chris.

Beautiful Women, Ugly Scenes (1983)

This is a first-rate opener, immediately placing readers inside the mind of a man trying to make sense of his past relationships with women. The candor reflected in his words suggest a man who’s thinking has resulted in some valuable insights

When I first came across the novel in the mid-1980s, I was immediately captivated. In many ways, the narrator’s opening words captured much of what I’d been thinking about in my own relationship history. Like so many men in that era, I believed I loved women, but often behaved in ways that were inconsistent with the behavior of someone who actually knew what the word love meant.

The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915)

These opening words come from protagonist and narrator Major-General Richard Hannay, a WWI English spy who went on to become something of a prototype for later characters created by Graham Greene, Ian Fleming, and John le Carré. Buchan’s novel—one of the earliest “man-on-the-run” spy thrillers—might have been lost to history if not for Alfred Hitchcock’s 1935 film adaptation, which became a movie classic.

In the novel, Hannay continued: “The weather made me liverish, the talk of the ordinary Englishman made me sick, I couldn’t get enough exercise, and the amusements of London seemed as flat as soda-water that has been standing in the sun. ‘Richard Hannay,’ I kept telling myself, ‘you have got into the wrong ditch, my friend, and you had better climb out.’”

Thank You for Smoking (1994)

No Way to Treat a First Lady (2002)

In the novel—an absolutely hilarious “take” on presidential sex scandals—the narrator continued: “He had told her on the previous occasions that he did not like being called this while, as he put it, congress was in session. But she couldn’t stop thinking to herself, I’m screwing the President of the United States! In the White House! Unavoidably, the ‘Mr. President’ just kept slipping out.” The novel, one of my all-time favorites, was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.

The Relic Master (2015)

When you pick up any one of Christopher Buckley’s numerous works of fiction or non-fiction, you can confidently expect to be greeted by a great opening paragraph, and that is certainly the case with this, his first historical novel. In the novel’s second paragraph, the narrator continued:

“For one, his asking price was far too low. A relic of the finger that had probed the spear wound in Christ’s side would fetch as much as forty or fifty gulden. And he was asking only fifteen. More troubling was the absence of fragrant odor when Dismas held it to his nostrils. A genuine relic was always pleasant to the nose.”

Make Russia Great Again (2020)

The narrator and protagonist is Herb Nutterman, a longtime Trump Organization employee who is called out of retirement to become President Donald Trump’s White House Chief of Staff. Buckley has given us some terrific opening lines in his career, and it was wonderful to see the old master continuing to perform at such a high level. This one easily made my list of The Top Twenty Opening Lines of 2020 (to be seen here).

Has Anyone Seen My Toes? (2022)

The first sentence of Buckley’s most recent novel—a hilarious and heavily autobiographical examination of an aging writer’s life during the COVID-19 pandemic—perfectly captures an almost universal experience (since reading it, I haven’t looked at my bathroom scale in the same way again). I was delighted to honor the opener in my compilation of “The Best Opening Lines of 2022” on Smerconish.com (see the full list here).

In the opening paragraph, the narrator continued:

“He imagines metallic groans, the sound of springs straining to their limit, the creak of timbers about to crack. But how can this be? It’s a high-tech scale, probably engineered by people whose native language is German and wear white laboratory gowns. It was a hint-hint present from his wife, Peaches. It tells you not only how much you weigh but also how much you weighed yesterday, and how many calories you can consume today in order to weigh less tomorrow. But all this is academic, for he cannot see the numbers, owing to the protuberance of his belly.”

Post Office (1971)

Opening lines rarely get any simpler—or more effective. It’s almost impossible not to wonder, “What began as a mistake?“ Post Office is a heavily autobiographical novel that was based on Bukowski’s three years as an employee of the U.S. Postal Service. The narrator is Henry Chinaski, a misanthropic alter ego who shows up in five Bukowski novels (he was also memorably played by Mickey Rourke in the 1987 film Barfly).

In the novel’s second paragraph, Chinaski continued: “It was Christmas season and I learned from the drunk up the hill, who did the trick every Christmas, that they would hire damned near anybody, and so the next thing I knew I had this leather sack on my back and was hiking around at my leisure. What a job, I thought. Soft!“

The Heart of a Dog (1925)

The Heart of a Dog is a searing satire of Russian Bolshevism. Almost immediately banned by Communist authorities, the novella didn’t surface again until many decades later. The narrator of the tale, it quickly becomes clear, is a dog—and a dog with strong political opinions.

As the story begins, he is writhing in pain. He goes on to explain: “Some bastard in a dirty white cap—the cook in the office canteen at the National Economic Council—spilled some boiling water and scalded my left side. Filthy swine—and a proletarian, too. Christ, it hurts. That boiling water scalded me right through to the bone. I can howl and howl, but what’s the use?“

Paul Clifford (1830)

A case could be made that these are the most famous opening words in literary history. They come from a popular 19th-century English writer who also composed some other famous lines, including “the pen is mightier than the sword” and “the pursuit of the almighty dollar.” The opening words of a novel are often about setting an atmosphere, and this one is a doozy. The entire first paragraph goes this way:

“It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the house-tops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.”

Almost immediately after the book’s publication, the Paul Clifford opening was regarded as an exceptional piece of writing. By the middle of the twentieth century, the line was so familiar it had become a cliché. In 1962, Madeleine L’Engle paid homage to the line when she opened her classic novel A Wrinkle in Time with the exact same words. When asked why she decided to do so, L’Engle said it was her way of indicating to the reader that a scary story was coming. She had heard it hundreds of times since her childhood, and it brought back childhood memories of huddling around campfires as a little girl and listening to scary tales.

By the mid-1960s, the phrase gradually began to become a victim of its own success. In a 1965 Peanuts cartoon, Charles Schulz featured a strip in which the character Snoopy attempted to write a novel. The first words came easy: “It was a dark and story night….” In future strips, however, whenever Snoopy sat down at his typewriter, these were the only words he could come up with. And thus began the line’s slow descent from fame to infamy.

A respectable writer, if not a particularly great one, Bulwer-Lytton doesn’t deserve the fate that has befallen him. In 1982, Scott Rice, an English professor at San Jose State University, appropriated his name for an annual contest for deplorable writing (yes, deplorable writing). Every year for the past four decades, contestants in The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest have been invited “to compose the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels.” The competition attracted only three entries the first year, but in recent years routinely receives more than 10,000 entries (there are now so many entries, in fact, that winners are announced in a variety of categories (romance, westerns, detective stories, etc.).

Earthly Powers (1980)

Few opening lines in literary history exceed this one in what might be called in-your-face daring. A 2012 article on “Arresting Openings” in London’s The Telegraph described this opener as “outrageously provocative.“

Also in 2012, The Guardian’s Robert McCrum hailed Burgess’s opening sentence as one of “The 10 Best First Lines in Fiction,“ writing: “This is one of the supreme show-off first-person openings. Burgess challenges the reader (and himself) to step on to the roller coaster of a very tall tale (loosely based on the life of Somerset Maugham).“

Junk (1996)

With these simple—but highly evocative—words, we are introduced to Gemma Brogan and David “Tar” Lawson, both fourteen years old and on the verge of escaping their highly dysfunctional home environments. Little do they know at this point of their journey that an even more dismal future awaits.

Burgess’s dark and gritty tale about teenage drug addiction went on to win the 1996 Carnegie Medal, awarded annually by England’s Library Association for the outstanding children’s book by a British writer. In 2007, on the 70th anniversary of the Carnegie Medal, Junk was named one of the Top Ten winners of the award. In 1997, the book was published in America under the title Smack, yet another slang term for heroin.

When the novel came out in a 25th Anniversary edition in 2021, the Guardian’s Julia Eccleshare wrote about it: “Melvin Burgess’s ground-breaking Junk remains the best book about teenagers and drugs to this day.”

Kat, Incorrigible (2011; pub. in England in 2010 as A Most Improper Magick)

The setting is Regency, England in 1803, and these delightful opening words come from Kat Stephenson, a young girl who discovers she has inherited magical powers from her mother, who died ten days after she was born. The novel went on to win the Waverton Good Read Children’s Award in 2011 for Best Debut Children’s Novel by a British writer.

In a 2014 SFSignal.com “Mind Meld” post, writer Paul Weimer asked a number of writers to identify their favorite opening lines. Writer Beth Bernobich wrote about this opener:

“Imagine a cup of frothy hot chocolate, served in an elegant cup, with a dollop of cream—sweet, but with an edge of that dark chocolate bitterness—a perfect antidote to cold November days. The opening paragraph to Kat, Incorrigible…is that first sip that tells right away what a treat you’re in for.”

Scales and Sensibility (2021)

Jane Austen’s legendary opening line from Pride and Prejudice has been tweaked in a multitude of ways over the years, but Burgis takes it in a whole new way in her YA fantasy update of Sense and Sensibility. In the opening paragraph, the narrator continued: “But it was becoming increasingly obvious to everyone in Hathergill Hall that for Penelope Hathergill, actually having a dragon would guarantee disaster.”

Purple Cane Road (2000)

In a 2021 blog post, writer Greg Levin included this opener in a post on “25 of the Best Opening Lines in Crime Fiction.” About his selections, Levin wrote: “Few things enthrall me more than cracking (or clicking) open a novel and reading a first line that catapults me into Chapter 1. A line that reminds me why I read, why I write, what it means to be alive. A line that gives me whiplash. A line that makes me forget to feed my pets for the next few hours.”

Camilla (1796)

The narrator continued: "Danger they encounter, but as the forerunner of success; difficulty, as the spur of ingenuity; and toil, as the herald of honor."

Mercury (2024)

I don’t know about you, but if any writer included the phrase “hiding from his wife” in an opening sentence, I’d be sure to read on.

Little Constructions (2007)

About these opening words, critic Lucy Ellmann wrote in a 2007 Guardian review: "From the very beginning you know you're in good, if slightly scary, hands. Burns is raring for a fight, and her startling energy might just bring feminism, and even women, back into fashion."

Milkman (2018)

The opening words come from an 18-year-old protagonist known only as “Middle Sister” (we will shortly learn that no characters in the novel are formally named). The novel was hailed by critics from the outset, and went on to become one of the most acclaimed books of the year, winning the 2018 Man Booker Prize, the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, and the 2019 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction.

In a 2019 “Narrative Muse” post, Australian blogger Aisha Lelic wrote, “Milkman had me hooked with the very first line,“ adding: “Its hypnotic rhythm and tone reminded me of hard-boiled fiction—tough, terse, and cynical with a touch of loneliness and dread. And yet it’s nothing like hard-boiled fiction. In fact, Milkman is like nothing I have ever read.“

Naked Lunch (1959)

This is the opening line of one of history’s most influential novels, first published in France as The Naked Lunch in 1959 by Olympia Press, but not in America until 1962 (from Grove Press) because of a protracted legal struggle against obscenity charges. The book continued to be “banned in Boston” until 1966, however, when the Massachusetts Supreme Court overturned a 1965 ruling that came in the last major obscenity trial in American literary history.

In addition to its free-wheeling, non-linear, experimental composition, the book helped bring the argot of the gritty underworld into popular usage. During the nine years it took to write the novel, the virtually unknown Burroughs had composing and editing help from some famous friends, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. Burroughs credited Kerouac with the title, saying it meant seeing things very clearly (he explained: “It means exactly what the words say: naked lunch, a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork”). Kerouac, however, offered a different explanation, saying the title resulted from a mis-reading of “Naked Lust,” a title he had suggested to Ginsberg.

In 2015, Alan Bisbort, editor of the punk-inspired website PleaseKillMe.com included Burrough’s opener on his personal “10 Best Opening Lines” list. In 2010, Time included Naked Lunch on its list of the “100 Best English-Language Novels from 1923 to 2005.” And, finally, in a fascinating footnote, musicians Donald Fagen and Walter Becker named their band “Steely Dan” after a revolutionary steam-powered dildo mentioned in the book.

Kindred (1979)

The opening words come from Dana Franklin, a 27-year-old black writer. A year earlier, she came to consciousness in a hospital to find her left arm amputated. When the police questioned her and husband Kevin, a white man who is also a writer, they were reluctant to tell the truth because their time-travel story is so far-fetched they know they will not be believed.

In the novel, Franklin continued: “And I lost about a year of my life and much of the comfort and security I had not valued until it was gone. When the police released Kevin, he came to the hospital and stayed with me so that I would know I hadn’t lost him too.”

Erewhon (1872)

The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934)

Readers bring themselves in very different ways to a book’s opening words, and a less perceptive reader might easily overlook the significance of this first sentence. The words come from narrator and protagonist Frank Chambers, a handsome young drifter who has been tossed out of a hay truck in front of a California diner operated by a middle-aged Greek man and his beautiful young wife. The book was an immediate hit, and the story so sizzling that it ultimately resulted in seven film adaptations (the best being the 1946 adaptation starring John Garfield and a voluptuous Lana Turner).

In a 2013 interview with The Atlantic’s Joe Fassler, Stephen King described Cain’s opening line as a “hook” that immediately engaged the reader’s interest. King then used the nine-word opening as a springboard for a 200-word analysis—and a mini-masterclass on writing:

“Suddenly, you’re right inside the story—the speaker takes a lift on a hay truck and gets found out. But Cain pulls off so much more than a loaded setting—and the best writers do. This sentence tells you more than you think it tells you. Nobody’s riding on the hay truck because they bought a ticket. He’s basically a drifter, someone on the outskirts, someone who’s going to steal and filch to get by. So you know a lot about him from the beginning, more than maybe registers in your conscious mind, and you start to get curious.

“This opening accomplishes something else: It’s a quick introduction to the writer’s style, another thing good first sentences tend to do. In “They threw me off the hay truck about noon,“ we can see right away that we’re not going to indulge in a lot of foofaraw. There’s not going to be much floridity in the language, no persiflage. The narrative vehicle is simple, lean (not to mention that the book you’re holding is just 128 pages long). What a beautiful thing—fast, clean, and deadly, like a bullet. We’re intrigued by the promise that we’re just going to zoom.“

The Institute (1976)

The opening words come from Lloyd Palmer, an English literature professor in search of money for an Institute he hopes to head. What he ends up with, however, is a boatload of trouble when he falls for the wealthy benefactor’s young, beautiful, and unhappy wife. The Institute was Cain’s last novel, written when he was eighty-five. The work may not have been up to his usual standard, but it had a first-class opening and provided much enjoyment to Cain’s many fans.

The Grand Design: A Novel of Dorothy Draper (2022)

A menacing opening line like this would be perfectly fitting for a high-octane suspense thriller, but it becomes even more impressive when we realize that the narrator and protagonist—18-year-old socialite Dorothy Tuckerman—is describing a 1908 “matchmaking” soiree for wealthy families at The Greenbrier Resort in West Virginia. As she continues in the novel’s opening paragraph, we begin to believe she is using the word prey figuratively rather than literally:

“I eyed the roast chicken in front of me and had pity on the poor fowl whose end was drizzled in sage butter and decorated with dainty carrots and pearl onions. I too was draped in finery for my final presentation—a Charles Worth ensemble of yellow-green silk with metallic gold floral brocade and beaded tassels at the back to accentuate my sleek figure.”

I also loved the masterly metaphorical way she began the novel’s second paragraph:

“I wasn’t the only one being prepared for a swift devouring. The dining room was filled with silk and chiffon served atop a platter of tradition and romance.”

Mastering the Art of French Murder (2023)

From the book’s title, it would be natural to surmise that this novel would have a Julia Child connection—and the first sentence confirms that suspicion in a lovely way. The words come from Tabitha Knight, an American woman who is in Paris on an extended stay with her French grandfather. Tabitha continues in the novel’s second paragraph:

“I knew all about it—every sordid detail—because, first, I was one of her closest friends in Paris…well, I wouldn’t be surprised if everyone in the seventh arrondissement—from the Place du Palais-Bourbon to the Tour Eiffel—had heard about the mayonnaise problem. Julia was just that kind of person. She was gregarious and ebullient and giddy and enthusiastic.”

In a Washington Post “Hidden Gems” article. Karen MacPherson said about the novel: “Part historical fiction, part mystery, Mastering the Art of French Murder is totally delectable entertainment for fans of lighthearted detective fiction.”

I was delighted to include Cambridge’s exceptional opener in my annual Smerconish.com compilation of “23 of the Best Opening Lines of 2023” on (see the full list here).

The Terra-Cotta Dog [Book 2 of The Inspector Montalbano Series] (1996; in English 2002)

I have a special affection for opening sentences that go on for 100-plus words, and even though this one, at 96 words, doesn’t quite make the magic number, it was so beautifully written that I believed it deserved inclusion in my collection

In a New York Times review, writer A. J. Finn (The Woman in the Window and more) wrote: “You either love Andrea Camilleri or you haven’t read him yet. Each novel in this wholly addictive, entirely magical series, set in Sicily and starring a detective unlike any other in crime fiction, blasts the brain like a shot of pure oxygen. Aglow with local color, packed with flint-dry wit, as fresh and clean as Mediterranean seafood—altogether transporting.”

The Stranger (1942)

This simple reflection has achieved an iconic status in modern literature. The narrator and protagonist is a French Algerian known only by the name Meursault. He continued: “The telegram from the Home says: YOUR MOTHER PASSED AWAY. FUNERAL TOMORROW. DEEP SYMPATHY. Which leaves the matter doubtful; it could have been yesterday.“

Meursault seems incapable of expressing normal, or expected, emotions. As a result, he went on to become the personification of a form of emotional detachment now commonly called alienation.

For Kings and Planets (1998)

In the opening paragraph, the narrator continued: “A seduction and a near miss, a time when his memory of the world around him—the shining stone stairwells, the taxicabs, the sea of nighttime lights—was glinting and of heroic proportion. Like a dream. He had almost been taken away from himself. That was the feeling he had, looking back.”

A Doubter’s Almanac (2016)

Even though we know nothing specifically about the two men, it is abundantly clear that one feels a strong animosity toward the other—an animosity almost certainly fueled by envy or jealousy. The opening paragraph also contains some provocative hints about where the novel might be headed—most notably the phrase the right woman.

In Cold Blood (1966)

In the opening paragraph, the narrator continued: “Some seventy miles east of the Colorado border, the countryside, with its hard blue skies and desert-clear air, has an atmosphere that is rather more Far West than Middle West. The local accent is barbed with a prairie twang, a ranch-hand nasalness, and the men, many of them, wear narrow frontier trousers, Stetsons, and high-heeled boots with pointed toes. The land is flat, and the views are awesomely extensive; horses, herds of cattle, a white cluster of grain elevators rising as gracefully as Greek temples are visible long before a traveler reaches them.“

In Cold Blood is a “non-fiction novel” that was based on the real-life 1959 murders of four members of the Clutter family by two ex-convicts who were later arrested, convicted, and executed for the crime. It became an immediate bestseller and is the second-bestselling true crime story in publishing history, after Vincent Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter (1974).

Ender’s Game (2010)

In a 2016 Guardian article on the best opening lines in children’s and young adult fiction (“Hook, Line, and Sinker”), Ciara Murphy wrote about this line: “Rarely do we start novels already rooting for a character from the very first sentence, but Orson Scott Card makes sure we do just that by immediately introducing us to ‘the one’. This line, from an unnamed narrator, describes a protagonist who we will shortly discover is named Andrew “Ender” Wiggin.

The Alienist (1994)

The opening words refer to the burial of Theodore Roosevelt, the 26th U. S. President and, earlier in his career, New York City Police Commissioner. They come from narrator John Moore, a crime reporter for The New York Times and a friend of the novel’s protagonist, Dr. Laszlo Kreizler, a New York City physician and noted alienist.

For those unfamiliar with the term alienist, a “Note” at the beginning of the novel explained: “Prior to the twentieth century, persons suffering from mental illnesses were thought to be ’alienated, not only from the rest of society but from their own true natures. Those experts who treated mental pathologies were known as ’alienists.’“

In the novel’s second paragraph, Moore continued: “The words as I write them make as little sense as did the sight of his coffin descending into a patch of sandy soil near Sagamore Hill, the place he loved more than any other on earth. As I stood there this afternoon, in the cold January wind that blew off Long Island Sound, I thought to myself: Of course it’s a joke. Of course he’ll burst the lid open, blind us all with that ridiculous grin and split our ears with a high-pitched bark of laughter. Then he’ll exclaim there’s work to do—’action to get’—and we’ll all be martialled to the task of protecting some obscure species of newt from the ravages of a predatory industrial giant bent on planting a fetid factory on the little amphibian’s breeding ground.“

The Angel of Darkness (1997)

The narrator is Stevie Taggert, the proprietor of a Manhattan tobacco shop. Taggert is a good friend of John Moore, an elderly New York Times reporter who’s been struggling to find a publisher for a manuscript he has completed about a grisly murder case solved years earlier by their mutual friend, the alienist Dr. Laszlo Kreizler. When Taggert suggests that Moore might be approaching things in the wrong way, the reporter gets testy and essentially says: if you think you can do a better job, do it.

The result is Taggert’s story about the case of Libby Hatch. Taggert begins the tale by apologizing for his deficient writing skills, but in doing so expresses himself more than adequately, even artfully. He continued: “Words haven’t figured much in my life, and though over the years I’ve met many of what the world counts to be the big thinkers and talkers of our time, I’ve stayed what most would call a plain man. And so a plain way of starting will suit me well.“

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865)

The Magic Toyshop (1967)

After the intriguingly suggestive first sentence, the narrator brilliantly captures an adolescent girl’s sexual awakening in a memorable metaphor about exploring newly discovered land. The opening paragraph continued about Melanie’s foray into new territory:

“She embarked on a tranced voyage, exploring the whole of herself, clambering her own mountain ranges, penetrating the moist richness of her secret valleys, a physiological Cortez, da Gama, or Mungo Park.”

For more than a half-century, countless numbers of teenage girls have found both comfort and camaraderie in Carter’s novel, and some of them were inspired to become writers. In a 2020 Guardian article, Anglo-Australian writer Evie Wyld (After the Fire, A Still Small Voice and other novels) paid The Magic Toyshop the highest compliment, writing:

“As a young girl experiencing that moment when your body is both the vessel for your self but suddenly, as if overnight, also a thing, a collection of objects for men to look at, assess, interpret and desire, Carter’s story seemed to speak directly to my life. That this was an experience from which art could be made felt like someone had opened a door somewhere.”

Clytemnestra: A Novel (2023)

Jennifer Saint (author of Ariadne and Elektra) had to be thinking about this opening paragraph—and much more—when she wrote about the book:

“Crackles with vivid fury, passion, and strength. A powerful, thought-provoking portrayal of a fascinating and complicated woman framed in beautiful prose. I loved it.”

O Pioneers! (1913)

My Ántonia (1918)

The narrator is Jim Burden, a successful New York lawyer who was born in Virginia, orphaned as a boy, and raised by his grandparents on their farm in Nebraska. He continued: “I was ten years old then; I had lost both my father and mother within a year, and my Virginia relatives were sending me out to my grandparents, who lived in Nebraska. I travelled in the care of a mountain boy, Jake Marpole, one of the ’hands’ on my father’s old farm under the Blue Ridge, who was now going West to work for my grandfather. Jake’s experience of the world was not much wider than mine. He had never been in a railway train until the morning when we set out together to try our fortunes in a new world.“

Lucy Gayheart (1935)

The narrator continued: “They do not talk of her a great deal, to be sure; life goes on and we live in the present. But when they do mention her name it is with a gentle glow in the face or the voice, a confidential glance which says: ’Yes, you, too, remember?’“

Don Quixote (1605)

In 1985, when Walker Percy was asked by staffers at The New York Times about his “favorite opening passage in a work of literature,“ he replied: “My choice is the first sentence of the first novel ever written—and perhaps still the best—Don Quixote.“ Percy went on to add: “My pleasure derives both from the sense of what Cervantes must have been feeling when he wrote it and from the anticipation of the coming adventures of the Knight of the Mournful Countenance.“

The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1988)

The narrator and protagonist of this coming-of age novel is 21-year-old Art Bechstein, the son of a mob money launderer who wants his son to pursue a legitimate career. Bechstein continued: “We’d just come to the end of a period of silence and ill-will—a year I’d spent in love with and in the same apartment as an odd, fragile girl whom he had loathed, on sight, with a frankness and a fury that were not at all like him. But Claire had moved out the month before. Neither my father nor I knew what to do with our new freedom.”

In a 2017 blog post (“20 Strategies to Write Your Novel’s First Paragraph”), writer, editor, and Bookfox.com founder John Fox wrote: “Talk about using a character to entice the reader. You just mention ‘gangster’ and everyone is all ears. And the emotional landscape of the son, and of his relationship to his father, is exceptionally clear. Consider how much information is packed into this single paragraph.”

Chabon was twenty-one and in his senior year at the University of Pittsburgh when he began writing the novel. He continued work on it when he was accepted into the two-year Creative Writing Program at the University of California at Irvine. Chabon used the novel as his thesis for an M.A. degree, awarded in 1987. One of his thesis advisors was UC-I professor Donald Heiney, who had written more than a dozen novels under the pen name of MacDonald Harris. Chabon’s professor was so impressed with the novel that he immediately passed it on to his agent. A year later, the book was published by William Morrow, became a surprise bestseller, and launched an extraordinary literary career for Chabon.

Wonder Boys (1995)

More than two decades after Wonder Boys was published, Chabon reflected on this opening line in a 2017 essay. He wrote that the words came effortlessly and provided all the questions that needed to be answered as he completed the book. He went on to add: “The seed of the novel—who would tell the story and what it would be about—was in that first sentence, and it just arrived. I just had to tease it all out.“

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000)

In a 2000 New York magazine review shortly after the book was published, Daniel Mendelsohn said the book "had me hooked from the first, wistful, epic-tinged sentence." The novel went on to win the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and in 2006 was hailed by Bret Easton Ellis (of American Psycho fame) as "one of the three great books of my generation." In 2019, The Guardian ranked the novel Number 57 on its list of The 100 Best Books of the 21st Century.

In a 2013 Atlantic magazine article titled "This Did Something Powerful to Me," staff writer Joe Fassler asked a number of authors to identify their "Favorite First Lines" from novels and other books. Roxane Gay, the American writer, professor, and social commentator, chose the opening words of Chabon's Amazing Adventures novel. She explained: "I love this sentence because it does so much work. The sentence is a story in and of itself and reveals Chabon's amazing talent for long, meandering sentences that are satisfying in both sound and substance."

Telegraph Avenue (2012)

Short, pithy first sentences, often called hooks, don’t have a monopoly on Great Opening Lines—and the shortest ones are simply unable to establish an atmosphere or develop characterization, as this beginning paragraph does so masterfully.

The Big Sleep (1939)

With these opening words, the literary world was introduced to Philip Marlowe, a Los Angeles private detective who would go on to be featured in six more Chandler novels (he also appeared in many later “authorized” novels by other others as well as in dozens of radio, film, and television adaptations). On the Big Screen, the role of Marlowe was played by such leading men as Dick Powell, Humphrey Bogart, Robert Montgomery, James Garner, Robert Mitchum, and Liam Neesom.

In the novel’s second paragraph, Marlowe continued: “The main hallway of the Sternwood place was two stories high. Over the entrance doors, which would have let in a troop of Indian elephants, there was a broad stained-glass panel showing a knight in dark armor rescuing a lady who was tied to a tree and didn’t have any clothes on but some very long and convenient hair. The knight had pushed the vizor [sic] of his helmet back to be sociable, and he was fiddling with the knots on the ropes that tied the lady to the tree and not getting anywhere. I stood there and thought that if I lived in the house, I would sooner or later have to climb up there and help him. He didn’t seem to be really trying.“

In a 2013 blog post, Professor Joseph Bentz of Azusa Pacific University wrote that he had chosen The Big Sleep for an Honor’s course he was teaching. After the class finished a first-read of the book, he began the classroom analysis of the work by asking students to read the first few pages aloud. This exercise, he wrote, helped them realize that “Almost every sentence in these two paragraphs has something to commend it.“ Bentz concluded his post by writing: “The opening paragraphs of The Big Sleep let us know we are starting a journey with a narrator who knows what he’s doing, both as a detective and as a storyteller. We like him from the start, and we can’t wait to see what he’ll do next. He doesn’t disappoint.“

The Lady in the Lake (1943)

The Little Sister (1949)

Some of the best opening lines quickly establish the “voice” of the narrator/protagonist, and Phillip Marlowe had one of the most recognizable voices in all of crime literature. In the opening paragraph, he continued:

“The door is locked, but next to it is another door with the same legend which is not locked. Come on in—there’s nobody in here but me and a big bluebottle fly. But not if you’re from Manhattan, Kansas.”

Trouble is My Business (1950)

In "Raymond Chandler: The Art of Beginning a Crime Story," a 2019 CrimeReads.com article, editor-in-chief Dwyer Murphy wrote: "You'd be hard pressed to find an author equal to Raymond Chandler in jolting a story alive. If Elmore Leonard was the king of the opening line, Chandler made a case for himself as the master of the opening paragraph. Whether he's describing the weather, the face of a building, a street corner, or the glint in a doorman's eye, Chandler brought the scene instantly to life and gave you an immediate and overwhelming feeling that you were in a real place, encountering real people caught up in the little dramas and tragedies that define all our lives."

The Long Goodbye (1953)

These intriguing first words come from Philip Marlowe, who continued about Terry Lennox: “He had a young-looking face but his hair was bone white. You could tell by his eyes that he was plastered to the hairline, but otherwise he looked like any other nice young guy in a dinner jacket who had been spending too much money in a joint that exists for that purpose and for no other.“

All is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost (2010)

The narrator continued: “It was 1986, and the most fervent feared they had missed the age of poetry—that they were born into the era of its decline. To Miranda and the School they came in defiance of that decline; or, at the very least, to sit for two years in the circle of her radiance.“

Bullett Park (1967)

This unusual first sentence doesn't merely invite readers to imagine the opening scene, it instructs them to do so. The narrator continues with some other details he believes are important to add: "Beyond the platform are the waters of the Wekonsett River, reflecting a somber afterglow. The architecture of the station is oddly informal, gloomy but unserious, and mostly resembles a pergola, cottage or summer house although this is a climate of harsh winters. The lamps along the platform burn with a nearly palpable plaintiveness. The setting seems in some way to be at the heart of the matter."

The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904)

This has long been my favorite Chesterton quotation, and I was pleasantly surprised to learn that it was the opening line of a 1904 alternate reality novel that imagined what life in London would be like in 1984. In a 2011 DailyWritingTips.com post on “20 Great Opening Lines to Inspire the Start of Your Story,“ Mark Nichol wrote about this opener: “Astute observations accompanied by an implied sigh of disgust are tricky to master, but Chesterton, one of the most multifaceted men of letters, lights the way for you with this sample of the form.“

There are many who believe that the future date chosen for Chesterton’s novel inspired George Orwell to title his classic dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Killing Floor [ Book 1 of 27 in the Jack Reacher series] (1997)

In a 2016 Criminalelement.com post on “5 Masters of Opening Lines” in crime fiction, Barry Lancet wrote:

“There’s a matter-of-factness to the opening lines of Lee Child’s first novel, Killing Floor, that is deceptive. A diner, lunchtime, eggs, and coffee—it’s hard to get more matter of fact than that. And yet, this simple opening segment’s immediacy captures our attention. The short, punchy sentences create a rhythm and pull us into the story with a series of equally matter-of-fact whys. Why was this guy arrested? Why is he eating breakfast at lunchtime? Why was he wet and tired and walking into town in the rain—who does that? Jack Reacher, of course.”

Child’s debut novel went on to win two of the highest honors given to mystery/crime novels, the Anthony Award and the Barry Award for Best First Novel. In 2022, it was adapted for the first season of the Amazon Prime Video series “Reacher,” starring Alan Ritchson in the title role.

My Education: A Novel (2013)

The narrator is Regina Gottlieb, a twenty-one-year old woman who is beginning her graduate studies at an elite East Coast university. She continued: “It was a vast university, of thousands of souls. There was no reason these two kinds of prominence—scandalous noteworthiness, and exceptional, even sinister, attractiveness—must belong to the same human being. Yet they had. The man was Nicholas Brodeur, though I knew it for sure only later.“

Trust Exercise (2019)

The opening paragraph ends on an ominous note, which is a time-honored way to begin a novel. From the outset, Choi's novel was hailed by critics, and it ultimately won the 2019 National Book Award for Fiction.

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926)

The opening words come from an English doctor named Dr. James Sheppard, the narrator of the novel and, in a surprise twist at the end, the perpetrator of the crime in question. In the novel’s opening paragraph, he continued: “It was just a few minutes after nine when I reached home once more. I opened the front door with my latchkey, and purposely delayed a few moments in the hall, hanging up my hat and the light overcoat that I had deemed a wise precaution against the chill of an early autumn morning. To tell the truth, I was considerably upset and worried. I am not going to pretend that at that moment I foresaw the events of the next few weeks. I emphatically did not do so. But my instinct told me that there were stirring times ahead.“

In 2013, after polling over 600 members, the British Crime Writers’ Association hailed The Murder of Roger Ackroyd as the best mystery novel in the history of the genre. Writing six years earlier in Agatha Christie: An English Mystery (2007), biographer Laura Thompson also gave it top honors, describing it as “The supreme, the ultimate detective novel. It rests upon the most elegant of all twists, the narrator who is revealed to be the murderer. This twist is not merely a function of plot: it puts the whole concept of detective fiction on an armature and sculpts it into a dazzling new shape. It was not an entirely new idea...nor was it entirely her own idea...but here, she realized, was an idea worth having. And only she could have pulled it off so completely.“

The Murder at the Vicarage (1930)

The narrator is the Rev. Leonard Clement, the local vicar and the narrator of this Miss Marple mystery. The key phrase in the opening words is one or two suggestive incidents, which prompted writer Karen Woodward to write in a 2014 blog post: “Right off the bat, the reader is busy hunting for clues and asking themselves which are the important bits and which are the red herrings.”

The vicar continued: “I had just finished carving some boiled beef (remarkably tough by the way), and on resuming my seat I remarked, in a spirit most unbecoming to my cloth, that anyone who murdered Colonel Protheroe, would be doing the world at large a service.”

Unfinished Portrait (1934; written under pen name Mary Westmacott)

The Moving Finger (1942)

The opening words come from narrator Jerry Burton, who had been hospitalized with injuries from an airplane crash. The book is formally classified as a “Miss Marple Mystery,” but she doesn’t make an appearance until about three-quarters of the way into the book.

Endless Night (1967)

The opening words come from narrator and protagonist Michael Rogers, who is clearly quoting a saying that has lodged in his mind. As Rogers continues, we see that he is experiencing something we’re all familiar with: we are intrigued by the clever or unusual phrasing of a quotation, but not exactly sure of its precise meaning.

Even when we don’t fully comprehend a quotation’s meaning, though, it can still provide a boost to our thinking. In Endless Night, for example, Rogers—a former English chauffeur with dark secrets in his past—continued:

“Is there ever any particular spot where one can put one’s finger and say: ‘It all began that day, at such a time and place, with such an incident?’”

Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case (1975)

The opening words come from Hercule Poirot, in his final appearance—and in the last book Christie published before her death in 1976. Aging, and crippled with arthritis, Poirot goes on to proclaim there is nothing wrong with what he fondly calls his “little gray cells.”

Sea Change (2023)

I loved the opening words of this weirdly wonderful debut novel. In fact, I’d say they completely had me by insert his hectocotylus. The words come from the narrator—a thirty-something aquarium worker named Ro—who continued:

“Unfortunately for Dolores, there is no bachelor octopus around ready to father her orphan eggs, and so when she turns that milky, almost pearlescent blue that I know means she is in the mood for love, there is no one but me to see.”

In a review on Debutiful.net, Adam Vitcavage wrote: “Sea Change is a standout of the 2023 debut class. It will pull you in from the first page and not let go as you traverse through a sea of originality. It’s filled with stunning and scrumptious prose.”

The Cardinal of the Kremlin (1988)

The narrator, who is describing an Afghan mathematics professor-turned-freedom fighter, continued: “In part, the name reflected the timeless nature of the struggle. The first of the Western invaders—for that was how they thought of them—had been Alexander the Great, and more had followed since. Ultimately, all had failed.““

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

Clarke, who wrote the novel as a companion volume to Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film by the same title, also offered some memorable opening words in the Foreword to the book: “Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living. Since the dawn of time, roughly a hundred billion human beings have walked the planet Earth. Now this is an interesting number, for by a curious coincidence there are approximately a hundred billion stars in our local universe. So for every man who has ever lived, in this universe there shines a star.“

Shōgun (1975)

Six Years (2013)

In a 2016 Criminalelement.com post on “5 Masters of Opening Lines” in crime fiction, Barry Lancet wrote:

“This first line in Harlan Coben’s Six Years jumpstarts his ‘domestic thriller.’ The book sees a man’s love torn apart in a seemingly impossible manner. This is everyone’s worst nightmare—set down in a single, deceptively smooth sentence. You cannot help but want to read on to figure out how in the world such a thing could have happened.”

Don’t Let Go (2017)

Of the many great opening lines Coben has penned in his career, this is my personal favorite. None of the others can match it in what might be called epistemological wackiness, and none are as laugh-out-loud funny. Don’t Let Go was Coben’s 30th novel, and, like the last ten, it debuted in the Number One spot on the New York Times bestseller list.

When asked about the opener in a CBS This Morning interview, Coben said, “I just thought I’d have fun with the first line ’cause we’re about to get dark.”

And get dark is a good way to describe the novel. Writing for the very first time in the first-person, present-tense, Coben let protagonist Napoleon “Nap” Dumas tell the entire tale— with most of it speaking directly to his dead twin brother (who died under mysterious circumstances while they were in high school). About the approach he took with the book, Coben said, “I’m trying to both break your heart and stir it a little.”

I Will Find You (2023)

In a Good Morning America book launch interview with the author, host George Stephanopoulos said about Coben’s new novel, “This one grabs you on page one,” adding “Once you get to that opening, you can’t put the book down.”

In the novel, narrator and protagonist David Burroughs, continued: “My son Matthew was three years old at the time of his brutal murder. He was the best thing in my life, and then he was gone, and I’ve been serving a life sentence ever since.”

A modern master of great opening lines, Coben once said on the subject: “I want to hook the reader as fast as possible. If I can accomplish that with the first sentence, that’s what I want to do, but it’s a heck of a challenge. I think the first sentence sets the tone for the rest of the novel. It’s like I’m saying to the reader, ‘Strap yourself in; we’re going on a very fast rollercoaster ride.’”

I was delighted to honor Coben’s terrific opener in my Smerconish.com compilation of “23 of the Best Opening Lines of 2023” (see the full list here).

Waiting for the Barbarians (1980)

The narrator, who is living in an unspecified time in the distant past, meets a man wearing a new and novel kind of protective eye covering. In the opening paragraph, he continued:

“Is he blind? I could understand it if he wanted to hide blind eyes. But he is not blind. The discs are dark, they look opaque from the outside, but he can see through them. He tells me they are a new invention.“

When Coetzee was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003, the Nobel Prize committee described Waiting for the Barbarians as “a political thriller in the tradition of Joseph Conrad, in which the idealist’s naiveté opens the gates to horror.“

Disgrace (1999)

Solved the problem of sex? Rather well? At age fifty-two? I don’t know about you, but I definitely want to learn more. In the opening paragraph, the narrator continued:

“On Thursday afternoons he drives to Green Point. Punctually at two p.m. he presses the buzzer at the entrance to Windsor Mansions, speaks his name, and enters. Waiting for him at the door of No. 113 is Soraya. He goes straight through to the bedroom, which is pleasant-smelling and softly lit, and undresses. Soraya emerges from the bathroom, drops her robe, slides into bed beside him. ‘Have you missed me?’ she asks. ‘I miss you all the time,’ he replies. He strokes her honey-brown body, unmarked by the sun; he stretches her out, kisses her breasts; they make love.”

In a 2017 blog post (“20 Strategies to Write Your Novel’s First Paragraph”), writer, editor, and Bookfox.com founder John Fox wrote about this opening paragraph: “This starts with sex, but remember that sex is primarily a way not to excite a reader sexually, but to communicate about the character. And this tells us an enormous amount about the character: divorced, thinks about sex as a problem to be solved, morally kosher with visiting prostitutes, and accepts that fake affection (affection that is paid for) is satisfactory. I keep reading not for the sex but for the character.”

With the terrific beginning above—and a writer of consummate skill—it’s no surprise that Disgrace went on to win the 1999 Booker Prize.

The Man in the Window (1992; republished 2013)

Cohen’s 1992 novel was one of Nancy Pearl’s “Book Lust Rediscoveries,” an imprint of out-of-print books personally selected for republication by a woman who is often described as “America’s Favorite Librarian.” In her Introduction to the book, Pearl wrote: “When I read the entrancing first line of The Man in the Window, I knew I’d made no mistake [in picking it up]. Here was a novel to love.”

In her introduction, Pearl continued: “That first line…made it impossible for me to put the book down. I loved the interplay of the fantastic—an angel!—with the utterly prosaic—a horse chestnut tree. And the specificity: not just any old chestnut tree, but a horse chestnut.” Simply on the basis of Cohen’s opening line, Pearl concluded: “Clearly, this was a book that was written with a reader like me in mind.”

Highfire (2020)

In a 2023 Guardian article, Irish writer Liz Nugent included this opener in her list of “The Top Ten First Lines in Fiction,” writing:

“Best known for his Artemis Fowl series for children, Highfire was Colfer’s first adult fantasy novel, a genre I had avoided because of my own narrow mind. But this line hooked me straight away. Vern, as it turns out, is a dragon, the last of his kind and a confirmed anthropophobic. The opening line shows that we have failed him. This fact is unequivocal. Why would he ever have anything to do with us in the future? I had to read on to find out in this wildly entertaining take on being antisocial.”

In the opening paragraph, the narrator continued: “He had known many in his life, even liked a few, but in the end they all sold him out to the angry mob. Which was why he holed up in Honey Island Swamp out of harm’s way.”

The Bookshop on the Corner (2016)

The opening words come from Nina Redmond, a Scottish librarian who has always dreamed of opening a bookstore. She continued: “It would be lovely, wouldn’t it, whenever you’re going through something difficult, if someone could just tap you on the shoulder and say, ‘Don’t worry, it’s completely worth it. It seems like absolutely horrible crap now, but I promise it will all come good in the end,’ and you could say, ‘Thank you, Fairy Godmother.’”

The Confessions of Frannie Langton (2019)

The year is 1826, the city is London, and these taut opening words come from Frannie Langton, a black Jamaican woman who has been accused of the double murder of her employers, the eminent English scientist George Benham and his French wife Marguerite. In the novel’s second paragraph, Frannie continued: “I duck my head, peer at my boots, grip my hands to stop their awful trembling. It seems all of London is here, but then murder is the story this city likes best,”

All in all, this is a compelling opening to a spectacular debut novel. About the book, writer Christine Mangan (Tangerine) wrote: “From the sweltering heat of the West Indies to the rain-slicked cobbles of London, Collins transports her readers to the nineteenth century with an enthralling historical thriller. Frannie Langton is an unforgettable heroine, one who boldly reclaims her narrative within the context of a history that seeks to silence her. The Confessions of Frannie Langton is gorgeous―Gothic writing at its very best.”

The Hunger Games [Book 1 of The Hunger Games Trilogy] (2008)

The opening words come from sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen, one of the modern era’s most popular literary heroines, thanks to the success of Collins’s blockbuster dystopian novel. She continued: “My fingers stretch out, seeking Prim’s warmth but finding only the rough canvas cover of the mattress. She must have had bad dreams and climbed in with our mother. Of course, she did. This is the day of the reaping.”

“The reaping?“ we immediately think, and in that exact moment, Collins achieves the goal of all opening paragraphs—seducing the reader into her world.

Catching Fire [Book 2 of The Hunger Games Trilogy] (2009)

The book begins with a bleak situation beautifully described by protagonist Katniss Everdeen. She continued: “I should get up, move around, and work the stiffness from my limbs. But instead I sit, as motionless as the rock beneath me, while the dawn begins to lighten in the woods. I can’t fight the sun. I can only watch helplessly as it drags me into a day that I’ve been dreading for months.”

Mockingjay [Book 3 of The Hunger Games Trilogy] (2010)

Katniss Everdeen begins the third book in The Hunger Games trilogy by surveying the complete destruction of her family home by the Capitol’s firebombs.

The Adventures of Pinocchio (1883)

So begins the story of a block of wood that ultimately became a wooden puppet named Pinocchio—and one of the most popular children’s stories of all time. Originally presented in 1881-82 in serial form in a popular Italian children’s magazine, the story was published as a single book in 1883. In 1957, the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce hailed it as one of the greatest works in all of Italian literature, not just children’s literature.

In her classic Children’s Literature (1972), Francelia Butler said the novel “remains the most translated Italian book and, after the Bible, the most widely read.” The opening lines above are from Carol Della Chiesa’s 1926 translation.

Dead Reckoning (2014)

In this heavily autobiographical novel, Colmore, a retired Episcopal priest, tells the story of Henry Simpson, a retired Episcopal priest. The narrator continued: “Old notes from seminary (good God, Henry, that paper on the sources of the Pentateuch belongs in a museum), a couple of citations commending my parish for housing the homeless. And tchotchkes my sisters and I couldn’t bring ourselves to toss out after our mother died.”

The Spy and the Priest: Which Way to Heaven? (2016)

In this opening paragraph, we are introduced to Max Hartman, an aging ex-CIA operative, the spy of the book’s title, and a childhood friend of Andy Coffer, the priest. The narrator continued: “Despite five major back operations, a sixth scheduled the next month, he’d felt no relief from the sciatic and lumbar pain. Prescription OxyContin and morphine had made him feel slow and stupid without touching the pain.”

The Poet (1996)

In The Poet, the first of three novels featuring investigative reporter Jack McEvoy, these opening words beautifully establish the “voice” of the protagonist, provide a window into his thinking process, and—in that final portion—pique our curiosity. In a 2010 blog post, mystery writer James Hayman wrote that Connelly’s first words are “among the best openings of any mystery or thriller I know.”

When the novel was issued in paperback in 2004, it included an Introduction by Stephen King, who described the opening sentence—Death is my beat—as “a blue-ribbon winner.” About the first sentence, King continued: “We are immediately hooked and pulled in. It’s not a cheat-line, either, but one that perfectly sets the tone: dark, brooding, just plain scary.“

King also heaped praises on the entire work, calling it “a marvelous and sustained piece of story-telling.” And finally, while admitting he doesn’t “use the word classic lightly,” King enthused, “The Poet may well prove to be one.”

La Fiesta Brava (1953)

In 1985, staffers at The New York Times asked a number of prominent American authors to identify their “favorite opening passage in a work of literature.“ Elmore Leonard selected this one, explaining: “It must be my favorite, because it’s the only opening passage of a book I can recall and recite word-for-word some 35 years later, and be moved by it. With a simple documentary sound, the passage sets the stage for drama, tragedy, and never fails to give me a chill.“

Lord Jim (1900)

The narrator is describing the title character, a disgraced British seaman who ends up in the South Seas, where he prefers to keep his real name secret and is known only by the pseudonym of Jim. In this classic novel of redemption, Jim proves to be such a hero to the Malaysian natives that they end up paying him the highest respect by addressing him as Tuan Jim, or Lord Jim.

The narrator continued in the novel’s first paragraph: “His voice was deep, loud, and his manner displayed a kind of dogged self-assertion which had nothing aggressive in it. It seemed a necessity, and it was directed apparently as much at himself as at anybody else. He was spotlessly neat, appareled in immaculate white from shoes to hat, and in the various Eastern ports where he got his living as ship-chandler’s water-clerk he was very popular.”

The Great Santini (1976)

The opening paragraph provides no information about where the novel is going, but it nicely captures the environment the protagonist is coming from. The narrator continued: “It was a sign to Bull Meecham that he was about to have a fine and memorable turbulent time. The commanding officer of the squadron, Ty Mullinax, had passed out in the early part of the afternoon and was resting in a beatific position on the table in the center of the room, his hands folded across his chest and a bouquet of lilies carefully placed in his zipper, rising out of his groin.”

The novel’s protagonist was based on Conroy’s actual larger-than-life father, U. S. Marine Colonel Don Conroy—a highly decorated fighter pilot and, in his private life, a highly abusive father. For a sense of exactly how abusive he was, see the entry by Wright Thompson, and be prepared for a heart-wrenching description.

Conroy’s father was still living when The Great Santini was published and, not surprisingly, he predicted the novel would be read only by “psychiatrists, homosexuals, extreme liberals, and women.” When the book—and subsequent film—became hugely successful, though, Colonel Conroy reflected deeply on his son’s portrayal of him, became a changed man, and went on to earn his son’s deep respect and affection. About his father’s profound personal transformation, Conroy went on to write: “He had the best second act I ever saw.”

In 1979, the novel was adapted in a critically acclaimed film, with Robert Duvall giving an Oscar-nominated performance as Bull Meecham. Michael O’Keefe, in the role of Meecham’s son Ben—a thinly disguised Pat Conroy—received a Supporting Actor Oscar nomination for his performance.

The Prince of Tides (1986)

The narrator, Tom Wingo, is a South Carolina teacher and football coach who has spent a lifetime struggling to overcome a dysfunctional childhood (the character was memorably portrayed in an Oscar-winning performance by Nick Nolte in a 1991 film adaptation).

Wingo continued: "I grew up slowly beside the tides and marshes of Colleton; my arms were tawny and strong from working long days on the shrimp boat in the blazing South Carolina heat. Because I was a Wingo, I worked as soon as I could walk; I could pick a blue crab clean when I was five. I had killed my first deer by the age of seven, and at nine was regularly putting meat on my family's table. I was born and raised on a Carolina sea island and I carried the sunshine of the low-country, inked in dark gold, on my back and shoulders."

Beach Music (1995)

This dramatic opening line comes from narrator and protagonist Jack McCall, a cookbook and travel writer who bears more than a passing resemblance to Conroy himself—a Southern writer with complicated family entanglements.

In the first paragraph, McCall continued: “Our sweet Leah was not quite two when my wife, Shyla, stopped her car on the highest point of the bridge and looked over, for the last time, the city she loved so well.”

Razorblade Tears (2021)

In a 2023 Guardian article, Irish writer Liz Nugent included this opener in her list of “The Top Ten First Lines in Fiction,” writing:

“Clearly, Cosby’s protagonist Ike has endured a lot of suffering and has also been on the wrong side of the law. With this line, Ike wins our sympathy. Men with badges have been turning up since childhood. Such a clever way to tell us that Ike is flawed, and also weary. And now we want to know the cause of the misery that is about to be revealed.”

The Red Badge of Courage (1895)

This is one of the most beautiful opening sentences in the history of American literature—so beautifully crafted that all we have to do is close our eyes and let the scene slowly appear in our minds. As impressive as is the opening sentence, things only get better as the opening paragraph continues:

“As the landscape changed from brown to green, the army awakened, and began to tremble with eagerness at the noise of rumors. It cast its eyes upon the roads, which were growing from long troughs of liquid mud to proper thoroughfares. A river, amber-tinted in the shadow of its banks, purled at the army’s feet; and at night, when the stream had become of a sorrowful blackness, one could see across it the red, eyelike gleam of hostile campfires set in the low brows of distant hills.“

In a 1914 article in the Yale Review (“Stephen Crane As I Knew Him”), Hamlin Garland wrote: “The first sentence fairly took me captive. It described a vast army in camp on one side of a river confronting with its thousands of eyes a similar monster on the opposite bank.”

A little over a century later, in The 100 Best Novels in English (2015), Robert McCrum described Crane’s classic work as “the godfather of all American war novels.” He also sang the praises of the opening paragraph, writing: “The Red Badge of Courage is not a conventional historical novel. Its texture is cinematic; at the same time, breaking the rules, it eschews all reference to time and place. As the ‘retiring fog’ lifts on the opening page, an army is revealed ‘stretched out on the hills, resting.’ This is followed by a brilliant passage, surely an inspiration to subsequent generations of screenwriters.”

In her 1998 biography, Badge of Courage: The Life of Stephen Crane, Linda H. Davis dropped a delicious tidbit about the novel’s opening words: Apparently, Crane had told close friends that the entire first paragraph came to him one night in something like an epiphany, with “every word in place, every comma, every period fixed.” Lacking a typewriter, he carefully wrote it out in longhand—and in ink—on legal-sized paper, and it went on to appear in exactly that way when the book was ultimately published.

Fountain Society (1999)

This was Craven’s first—and only—novel, and he gets off to an exceptional start. The narrator continued: “The cell contained, so far as Rashid al-Assad had been able to gather, three Lebanese commandos who kept to themselves and were dreaded even more than the jailers. One of their number had been beaten badly during capture and was raving with fever and gangrene. This kept the others in a murderous mood.“

The Last Good Kiss (1978)

Crumley, who was described by London’s The Guardian newspaper as “The poet laureate of hard-boiled literature,” once told an interviewer that it had taken him eight years to write this single first sentence. It appears to have paid off, as it went on to become his most widely quoted line. In 2008, The Last Good Kiss was described by writer Doug Moe as “the most influential crime novel of the last 50 years.”

In a 2008 obituary in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, writer and editor David McCumber wrote: “When I finally caught up with Jim Crumley, he was drinking whiskey with a poet named Martha Elizabeth in a ramshackle joint in Missoula, Mont., drinking the heart right into a gray winter afternoon. Those of you who know James Crumley’s work will recognize that as a terrible paraphrase of what’s been called the best opening sentence in the history of crime fiction.”

The Mexican Tree Duck (1993)

In a 2008 obituary in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the writer and editor David McCumber cited this as yet another favorite opening line of crime fiction fans. He went on to add: “The freights come right past my window here, Jim, and when I hear that wail on winter’s gray afternoons, I’ll think of you.“

American Dirt (2020)

This is the first sentence of a bestselling book that, while heavily criticized as inauthentic by many in the Latinx community, was hailed by such legendary writers as Stephen King and John Grisham.

Perhaps the most extraordinary words of praise, though, came from writer Don Winslow (The Border and other works), who wrote: “From its heart-stopping first sentence to its heart-shattering last, Cummins’s story of immigrants is just what we need now. Gritty yet sensitive, realistic yet hopeful, grand and granular, American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins is a Grapes of Wrath for our times.”

In the novel’s opening paragraph, the narrator continued: “Luca hardly registers the mild noise it makes as it flies past and lodges in the tiled wall behind him. But the wash of bullets that follows is loud, booming, and thudding, clack-clacking with helicopter speed.”

James and the Giant Peach (1961)

These words could begin any typical children’s book, but things take a dramatic, dark, and disturbing turn as the reader moves on to the second paragraph: “Then, one day, James’s mother and father went to London to do some shopping, and there a terrible thing happened. Both of them suddenly got eaten up (in full daylight, mind you, and on a crowded street) by an enormous angry rhinoceros which had escaped from the London Zoo.“

Matilda (1988)

This is an intriguing way to begin any book, but especially a children’s book. This is no ordinary children’s book, however. Dahl’s narrator continued in the novel’s second paragraph: “Well, there is nothing very wrong with all of this. It’s the way of the world. It is only when the parents begin telling us about the brilliance of their own revolting offspring, that we start shouting, ‘Bring us a basin! We’re going to be sick.’”

The Miseducation of Cameron Post (2012)

With an opening sentence like this, readers immediately sense they’re in for quite a ride—and they won’t be disappointed. In Miles City, Montana in 1989, twelve-year-old Cameron Post is beginning to experience sexual feelings for other girls when her parents die in an automobile accident. Placed in the care of her grandmother and a deeply religious aunt, Cameron’s struggle for authenticity takes place in an environment with many obstacles, including “conversion therapy” for gay adolescents.

In a 2012 review in the Los Angeles Times, Susan Carpenter hailed Danforth as a “talented wordsmith,“ adding that she writes with “impeccable phrasing but emotional and visual clarity, drilling down into individual moments and dwelling there in slow motion to help readers experience Cameron’s hopes and fears.“

In 2018, the film was adapted into a film, starring Chloë Grace Moretz in the title role. At the Sundance Film Festival, it was awarded the U. S. Grand Jury Prize, the film festival’s highest award.

The Damage Done (2010)

This dramatic opening serves as our introduction to travel writer Lily Moore, who will soon be making a transition to private investigator. In a 2011 blog post, bibliophile Linda S. Brown wrote about the first sentence: “We’ve all seen enough crime shows to know just what that yellow tape means. In fourteen words, Davidson paints a vivid scene, one we won’t forget.”

This was Davidson’s debut novel after working as a travel writer for ten years, and it went on to win the 2011 Anthony Award for Best First Novel.

Murther and Walking Spirits (1991)

I’m a sucker for tales told by dead narrators, and this is one of the best in that sub-genre. In this case, the narrator and protagonist is a Canadian film critic named Connor “Gil” Gilmartin. The novel begins when he unexpectedly arrives home to find his attractive wife in flagrante with a fellow film critic—a man he has always dismissively referred to as “the Sniffer.“ After his wife’s lover strikes him on the temple with a walking stick, killing him instantly, Gilmartin continued:

“How did I know that I was dead? As it seemed to me, I recovered consciousness in an instant after the blow, and heard the Sniffer saying, in a quavering voice: ’He’s dead! My God! I’ve killed him!’ My wife was kneeling by my side, feeling my pulse, her ear to my heart; she said, with what I thought was remarkable self-possession in the circumstances, ’Yes, you’ve killed him.’“

The Mandarins (1954)

The man looking upward is Henri Perron, editor of a leftist newspaper in Paris during WWII (Perron is believed by many to be a fictional version of Albert Camus). Word from the front lines is just arriving that Allied planes have scored a major victory over Nazi forces. The novel went on to win the 1954 Goncourt Prize.

The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman (1992)

This is a powerful opening sentence, and readers immediately begin to wonder, “What has this man done that haunts him so?“ The narrator continued: “In his anguish it was as if ancient coffers opened before his eyes, but instead of overflowing with gold doubloons, louis d’or, silver crucifixes encrusted with rubies, there spilled out demons.“

Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (1994)

The narrator continued: “He had attended a surprisingly easy calving, lanced one abscess, extracted a molar, dosed one lady of easy virtue with Salvarsan, performed an unpleasant but spectacularly fruitful enema, and had produced a miracle by a feat of medical prestidigitation.“

In 2001, the novel was adapted into a film starring Nicolas Cage and Penélope Cruz.

A Partisan’s Daughter (2008)

The Last September (2019)

The opening words come from Brett Mercier, a 32-year-old Cape Cod wife and mother of a baby girl who is just learning to walk. After a captivating first sentence, she provides a strong hint about her background (we soon learn she is the daughter of two college professors and is herself only a dissertation away from getting a Ph.D. in English literature). As she continues, Brett offers a thought aimed directly at bibliophiles and fans of great opening lines, two groups likely to be familiar with the Latin phrase that means, “into the middle of things.” In the opening paragraph, Brett continued:

“And though my specialty is American Renaissance poetry, I did have to study the classics. Homer, Dante, Milton. They knew about the middle, how all of life revolves around a single moment in time. Everything that comes before leads up to that moment. Everything that comes afterward springs from that moment. In my case, that moment—that middle—is my husband’s murder.”

In a blurb for the book, the writer Brad Watson (The Heaven of Mercury and more) wrote: “I was hooked by the first paragraph, which somehow contains all the beautiful, luminous grief of the whole story, and I truly did not want to let it go in the end.”

The Christie Affair (2022)

In a Wall Street Journal review, Tom Nolan wrote that the novel “Sizzles from the first sentence,” and I was pleased to include it in my compilation of “The Best Opening Lines of 2022” on Smerconish.com (see the full list here).

In 1926, Agatha Christie was one of the world’s most popular writers when, after her husband told her he was leaving her for his mistress, she famously disappeared for eleven days. While Christie never talked about what happened, the story has been explored in a number of books and films—but never more ingeniously than in de Gramont’s novel, which told the story from the perspective of Nan O’Dea, the mistress of Agatha Christie’s husband. In the novel, O’Dea continued with a dark but powerful observation:

“It’s a particular feeling, the urge to murder. First comes rage, larger than any you’ve ever imagined. It takes over your body so completely it’s like a divine force, grabbing hold of your will, your limbs, your psyche. It conveys a strength you never knew you possessed. Your hands, harmless until now, rise up to squeeze another person’s life away. There’s a joy to it. In retrospect it’s frightening, but I daresay in the moment it feels sweet, the way justice feels sweet.”

The Tents of Wickedness (1959)

The Vale of Laughter (1967)

By the simple insertion of a comma, De Vries completely changes the meaning of Melville’s classic opening line from Moby-Dick. The opening words come from Joe Sandwich, a wisecracking stockbroker who is talking on the phone to a client named Ishmael (or, as he sometimes calls him, “Ish, baby”).

Sandwich continued: “Feel absolutely free to. Call me any hour of the day or night at the office or at home and I’ll be glad to give you the latest quotation with price-earnings ratio and estimated dividend of any security traded in those tirelessly tossing, deceptively shaded waters in which we pursue the elusive whale of Wealth, but from which we come away at last content to have hooked the twitching bluegill, solvency.“

Becoming Strangers (2004)

In a Feb. 20, 2004 review in The Guardian, critic Julie Myerson offered a thorough and thoughtful analysis of this opening. She began by writing: “The opening lines of Louise Dean’s quite exceptional first novel may not be much of a laugh, but they stopped this reader in her tracks. It rarely takes me more than a page or two to sense whether a novel’s going to take me somewhere worth going. In Dean’s case, those first 17 words were enough. My heart raced and I sat up. I knew.“

Myerson went on: “It’s not just the bald, frank darkness of those two opening statements, nor the ache of truth they contain. And it’s not just about the rise-and-fall rhythm of the words either, the pleasing arc that the collision of the two sentences somehow creates. No, most of all, I think, it’s what the writer makes you feel—instantly—about this mystery ’he’: a wave of naked curiosity. Who on earth is this man, whose life has been so vivified by death?“

The Vehement Flame (1922)

These delightful opening words describe 19-year-old Maurice Curtis, who, sitting on the lawn with his brand-new bride Eleanor, exclaims with a beguiling naivete:

“We have been married exactly fifty-four minutes. If I love you like this after fifty-four minutes of married life, how do you suppose I shall feel after fifty-four years of it?”

The Maze [Book 8 in the John Corey series] (2022)

Some opening lines are like a warm handshake accompanied by a big grin—sending the message, “C’mon in. Even though we’re about to embark on some serious business, there’s nothing wrong with having a little fun along the way.” This is one of two wonderful 2022 novels that begin with a modern proverb (see the other one from Marianne Wiggins here), and they both work beautifully. I was delighted to honor both openers in my compilation of “The Best Opening Lines of 2022” on Smerconish.com (see the full list here).

The opening line comes from former NYPD homicide detective, John Corey, who goes on to explain that he’s been enjoying a beer-drinking, crossword puzzle-playing vacation at his uncle Harry’s large Victorian house overlooking Long Island’s Great Peconic Bay. In the novel’s second paragraph, Corey goes on to make yet another clever observation:

“I’d been chilling here for about three weeks, and as I’d said the last time I was borrowing Harry’s summer house, the problem with doing nothing is not knowing when you’re finished.”

Deadwood (1986)

If a first sentence can bring a big smile to a reader’s face—and that was certainly true in my case—it automatically deserves the designation of a Great Opening Line. In his 2007 writing guide Hooked, writer and writing teacher Les Edgerton hailed this as an exemplary opener. About it, he posed this question to his readers: “Can you imagine not wanting to find out what happens to this kid when Bill returns from his whiz and find his horse dead and primed for the glue factory?”

The Paperboy (1995)

In a 2004 NPR interview with host Steve Inskeep, award-winning librarian Nancy Pearl hailed this as “the best contemporary first line,” adding, “Now that’s a line you couldn’t stop” after reading it. Inskeep immediately picked up on her words, saying, “Why was he once a famous man? Why is he not a famous man any more?” Pearl added that another attractive feature of the line was that it was in the past tense, posing the powerful question: “So what happened to him?”

In the novel’s second paragraph, the narrator—the unnamed brother of Ward James—further piques our interest by suggesting that the father of the two men has played an important role in the story: “No one mentions that now, and I suppose no one is inclined to bring it up, particularly not my father, who in other matters loves those things most that he can no longer touch or see, things washed clean of flaws and ambiguity by the years he has held them in his memory, reshaping them as he bring s them out, again and again, telling his stories until finally the stories, and the things in them, are as perfect and sharp as the edge of the knife he keeps in his pocket.”

Spooner (2009)

In a 2019 Book Chase blog post, reviewer Sam Sattler wrote about three favorite opening paragraphs, this one from Spooner, another from Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove, and a third from John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany.

About this one, he wrote: “A good first paragraph is one of the most important tools an author has available to grab my book-browsing attention—usually quickly and in less than 100 words. I can learn more about the style and readability of an author from an opening paragraph than I will ever gather from a canned dust jacket summary or some blurb from a fellow author of the writer’s that I wouldn’t believe in a million years anyway.”

Nicholas Nickleby (1838)

It takes awhile to get to the conclusion of the opening paragraph, but the brilliantly constructed metaphor of love as a gamble at the end makes it all worth it.

A Christmas Carol (1843)

These opening words have been popular since they were first written, and even showed up in a clever bit of repartee a few years back. As the story goes, Harlan Ellison was giving a lecture on writing fiction when he confidently asserted, “The opening of a story must breathe! It must have life!” Before he could say another word, a voice from the back of the room retorted, “Marley was dead, to begin with.”

In Dickens’s classic novel, the narrator continued: “The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it. And Scrooge’s name was good upon ’Change for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.”

The expression “good upon ’Change” has puzzled readers—especially American readers—since A Christmas Carol was first published. ’Change is a shortened version of Exchange (as in The Stock Exchange or The Royal Exchange). The meaning of the passage is that Scrooge’s reputation among money traders was so good that his signature could be absolutely relied on.

The saying dead as a doornail, you should also know, was not original to Dickens; he was simply repeating a popular colloquial expression that dates to the 14th century in England. The narrator went on to add about the phrase: “Mind! I don’t mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile, and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the country’s done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail.”

Dombey And Son (1848)

The narrator continued: “Dombey was about eight-and-forty years of age. Son about eight-and-forty minutes. Dombey was rather bald, rather red, and though a handsome, well-made man, too stern and pompous in appearance to be prepossessing. Son was very bald, and very red, and though (of course) an undeniably fine infant, somewhat crushed and spotty in his general effect as yet.”

David Copperfield (1849)

I’ve long admired this opening and recently came across a 2020 Book Riot post from blogger Kathleen Keenan (“City Girl with a Twist”) that perfectly summarized my own feelings: “Whatever you think of Dickens as a writer, he knew how to establish a mood immediately.”

In the novel, generally regarded as the most autobiographical of Dickens’s works, the title character continued: “To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o’clock at midnight. It was remarked that the clock began to strike, and I began to cry, simultaneously.”

A Tale of Two Cities (1859)

This is the full 119-word opening sentence of the novel, but most people remember only the first twelve words—among the most famous and most beautiful in literary history. Dickens was writing about the French Revolution, but his words applied equally to the era he was living in: The Industrial Revolution. It was a time of massive contradictions (immense wealth and poverty; great knowledge and ignorance, etc.), and Dickens chose the perfect literary device—antithesis—to capture it.

Few descriptions of the passage can improve upon English writer Clare Balding’s assessment, offered in a Stylist.com article a few years back: “There is so much there, in one sentence. I love the rhythm and the perfect balance of every clause, the promise of what is to come and the juxtaposition of hope with dread. It is poetry as prose, perfect in itself and yet tempting you on to turn the page.”

In a 2015 blog post titled “More About Opening Lines.“, Dean Koontz wrote: “It’s the perfect example of how a bravura writer can break all kinds of rules and get away with it.:

Perhaps the most original analysis of the famous opening, though, came from American writer and writing teacher Peter Selgin. In Your First Page (2019), he described the passage as “the rhetorical equivalent of what, in a movie, would be a wide-angle establishing shot.” Selgin went on to add: “Rather than plunge us into the heart of the story, such an opening serves as a sort of framing device, an imposing ornate gate through which we pass to get to the story. Call it the red-carpet treatment. But gate and carpeting are there not merely to flatter but to orient us. Along with all the pomp and paradox, Dickens lays out the period in which his story is set.”

Great Expectations (1860)

Rameau’s Nephew (1762)

The opening words—which are not exactly sizzling—come from an unnamed narrator who bears an uncanny resemblance to the real-life author. Continuing in the first paragraph, though, the narrator heats things up considerably as he continues with one of literary history’s great metaphorical passages: “I hold discussions with myself on politics, love, taste or philosophy, and let my thoughts wander in complete abandon, leaving them free to follow the first wise or foolish idea that comes along, like those young rakes in the Allée de Foy who run after a giddy-looking little piece with a laughing face, sparkling eye and tip-tilted nose, only to leave her for another, accosting them all, but sticking to none. In my case my thoughts are my wenches.”

This entire first paragraph—but especially the final portion—has such a modern, on-the-edge sensibility that it is hard to believe it was written more than a dozen years before the American Revolution (to be precise, it was written in 1761-62, but first published in a German edition by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in 1805). According to historians, Diderot did not want the piece published during his lifetime for fear of being sued or arrested for his portrayal of the rich and powerful of the time (he had been briefly imprisoned in 1749 for some other writings, so his wariness was understandable). All modern translations of the work are based on a complete manuscript—in Diderot’s own handwriting—found by a French librarian in 1890.

It was because of passages like this that book critic Michael Dirda preferred Diderot over such other French Enlightenment writers as Rousseau and Voltaire. In his Classics for Pleasure (2007), Dirda wrote that Diderot possessed “the kind of restless, original mind that throws off ideas like a Fourth of July sparkler. He is irresistible.”

Run River (1963)

The narrator continued: “She knew the time precisely because, without looking out the window into the dark where the shot reverberated, she continued fastening the clasp in the diamond wrist watch Everett had given her two years before on their seventeenth anniversary, looked at it on her wrist for a long time, and then, sitting on the edge of the bed, began winding it.”

A Book of Common Prayer (1977)

The simplest opening line can raise a host of questions. Why does she need a witness? Who is this woman she is referring to, anyway? And why is she bringing this up at the very beginning of the novel? There is also an intriguing hint about some kind of problem—or perhaps even danger—associated with being her witness.

A Study in Scarlet (1887)

This may not be the most compelling opening line in literary history, but it serves as an introduction to narrator Dr. John Watson, who will shortly learn about a fellow Londoner—someone said to be “a little queer in his ideas”—who is looking for someone with whom he might share an apartment. When Dr. Watson is first introduced to the man, he is startled when the stranger immediately says to him, “You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive.”

The Sign of the Four (1890)

After this dramatic opening, Dr. John Watson—the beloved sidekick and chronicler of literary history’s greatest consulting detective—continued: “For some little time his eyes rested thoughtfully upon the sinewy forearm and wrist, all dotted and scarred with innumerable puncture marks. Finally, he thrust the sharp point home, pressed down the tiny piston, and sank back into the velvet-lined armchair with a long sigh of satisfaction.”

For more than a hundred and thirty years, new readers have been stunned to learn of Holmes’s addiction to cocaine (his famous “seven-percent solution”). Dr. Watson describes the scene masterfully above, and in the very next paragraph, reveals what can only be called—in modern terms—his own codependency: “Three times a day for many months I had witnessed this performance, but custom had not reconciled my mind to it. On the contrary, from day to day I had become more irritable at the sight, and my conscience swelled nightly within me at the thought that I lacked the courage to protest.”

The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902)

Advise and Consent (1960)

Rebecca (1938)

The opening words come from an unnamed female narrator who is known only as “the second Mrs. de Winter.” The first Mrs. de Winter, of course, is the title character. The first sentence went on to become one of literary history’s most celebrated opening lines, and I was shocked when it did not appear among the American Book Review’s “100 Best First Lines from Novels” in 2006.

In an April 2012 Guardian article on “The Ten Best First Lines in Fiction,” Robert McCrum said the opening words have a “haunting brevity.” And in a July 2021 article in The Strand Magazine (“For Openers: Great First Lines of Legendary Novels”) writer Deborah Goodrich Royce wrote:

“Okay, most of us love Rebecca and can quote this sentence. But why is it so evocative? What does it do to us in a few seconds that keeps us reading this book? It sets a tone immediately and tips us off to a couple key points. First, it lets us know that something is lost to the narrator: a place called Manderley. And I, for one, want to know why. Why is this person dreaming of Manderley? It sounds like he/she can’t go there. Which naturally makes me want to go there, myself. Secondly, beginning a novel with a dream creates a hazy, unreal feeling. It evokes a gothic mood where the reader needs to pay attention to what may or may not be reality. And the author has hooked me already.”

My Cousin Rachel (1951)

In Book Lust to Go (2010), celebrity librarian Nancy Pearl wrote, “I’ll never forget the first lines” of the novel, adding, “Those sentences still send a shiver up my spine.”

In the novel’s opening paragraph, the narrator continued: “Now, when a murderer pays the price for his crime, he does so up at Bodmin, after fair trial at the Assizes. That is, if the law convicts him, before his own conscience kills him. It is better so. Like a surgical operation. And the body has a decent burial, though a nameless grave. When I was a child, it was otherwise. I can remember as a little lad seeing a fellow hang in chains where the four roads meet. His face and body were blackened with tar for preservation. He hung there for five weeks before they cut him down, and it was the fourth week that I saw him.”

Mary Ann (1954)

Killing Mr. Griffin (1978)

When the chilling idea of killing someone is so matter-of-factly expressed, it has a jarring quality—but also a compelling one. Duncan was a pioneering figure in what eventually became known as YA (Young Adult) fiction, and a number of her works, including Killing Mr. Griffin, I Know What You Did Last Summer (1973), and Summer of Fear (1976) were adapted into popular films aimed at a teen audience.

In a New York Times review (“Teaching Teacher a Lesson”), writer Richard Peck wrote about the Mr. Griffin book: “Lois Duncan breaks some new ground in a novel without sex, drugs or black leather jackets. But the taboo she tampers with is far more potent and pervasive: the unleashed fury of the permissively reared against any assault on their egos and authority. A group of high school seniors kill an English teacher who dares trouble them with grades, homework and standards.”

Peck went on to add: “The value of the book lies in the twisted logic of the teenagers and how easily they can justify anything.”

Gulliver Quick (1992)

Five women? This guy must’ve been quite The Ladies’ Man. The story then takes a mysterious tone as the narrator continued: “Although these tales were intriguing, they made little sense. Then, abruptly, the case was dismissed. Secrecy shrouded the affair, and the five women, released from further investigation by the Italian police, refused to discuss his death. Reporters, foiled by the women’s silence, eventually abandoned the story.“

Ennui (1809)

Edgeworth was well known for her anti-aristocratic sentiments, and the opening chapters of Ennui provide a powerful commentary on the deleterious effects of great wealth and inherited privilege on English society.

The novel begins as a kind of memoir of Lord Glenthorn, a young English gentleman, who continued: “And I was confirmed in the pride of helplessness by being continually reminded that I was the only son and heir of the Earl of Glenthorn.“

Adam Bede (1859)

The narrator continued: “With this drop of ink at the end of my pen I will show you the roomy workshop of Mr. Jonathan Burge, carpenter and builder, in the village of Hayslope, as it appeared on the eighteenth of June, in the year of our Lord 1799.”

Felix Holt, the Radical (1866)

Someone is coming, and given the phrasing some one, it is probably an important person, perhaps even a royal. But who, exactly? A sense of expectancy is created in the first few words, and continues for the remainder of the opening paragraph:

“As early as two o’clock in the afternoon the aged lodge-keeper had opened the heavy gate, green as the tree trunks were green with nature’s powdery paint, deposited year after year. Already in the village of Little Treby, which lay on the side of a steep hill not far off the lodge-gates, the elder matrons sat in their best gowns at the few cottage-doors bordering the road, that they might be ready to get up and make their curtsy when a travelling-carriage should come in sight; and beyond the village several small boys were stationed on the lookout, intending to run a race to the barnlike old church, where the sexton waited in the belfry ready to set the one bell in joyful agitation just at the right moment.”

Middlemarch (1871-72)

The opening line of Middlemarch is both an elegantly phrased description of nineteen-year-old Dorothea Brooke and a perfect illustration of the quality of writing that awaits the reader in the rest of novel.

As the opening paragraph continues, Eliot doesn’t disappoint: “Her hand and wrist were so finely formed that she could wear sleeves not less bare of style than those in which the Blessed Virgin appeared to Italian painters; and her profile as well as her stature and bearing seemed to gain the more dignity from her plain garments, which by the side of provincial fashion gave her the impressiveness of a fine quotation from the Bible—or from one of our elder poets—in a paragraph of today’s newspaper.”

Daniel Deronda (1876)

These are the first thoughts that spring to the mind of the title character as he finds himself strongly responding to a brief glance from a woman who is experiencing a run of bad luck at a roulette table in a German gambling resort. As the opening paragraph unfolds, his thought process continues:

“And what was the secret of form or expression which gave the dynamic quality to her glance? Was the good or the evil genius dominant in those beams? Probably the evil; else why was the effect that of unrest rather than of undisturbed charm? Why was the wish to look again felt as coercion and not as a longing in which the whole being consents?“

The Grasshopper King (2003)

It’s rare for a math genius to write an entertaining and engaging book of fiction, but Ellenberg, one of America’s most respected mathematicians, proves it can be done—and with a most inviting opening sentence as well.

American Psycho (1991)

My reaction when I first read these stream-of-consciousness opening words was, “I believe we’re in for quite a ride here!” And I wasn’t disappointed. In what is generally regarded as a searing indictment of yuppie culture during the 1980’s Wall Street Boom, the narrator and protagonist is Patrick Bateman, a greedy, superficial, possession-flaunting, Donald Trump-idealizing Manhattan investment banker whose mental instability takes a horrifyingly dark turn.

In 2011, English blogger Matt Tuckey wrote about the opening words: “Here Ellis instantly sets up the voice of the narrator—intelligent but muddled, overstimulated and in a very bad place mentally. The narrator’s thoughts jump from one thing to another, a trait of the insane, and a trait of those who are exposed to too much advertising. He ties together commercialism and insanity in one immense sentence—two themes which run strong on every page of the book. Brilliant.”

In a 2000 film adaptation, actor Christian Bale memorably inhabited the role of Bateman, leading critic Roger Ebert to write that he was “heroic in the way he allows the character to leap joyfully into despicability.”

After Life (2000)

In Book Lust (2003), librarian and bibliophile Nancy Pearl counted this as one of her favorite first lines, writing that it contained “a definite hint of mystery, not to say menace.“

In the novel, the narrator continued: “This was more than ten years ago, and I’ve forgotten some of what came before and after, but that night and the following day I remember in extravagant detail. I had lain awake all night, trying to imagine how I might get him off the bed and down the stairs and into the rowboat, since he weighed at least a hundred and fifty pounds and might have gone stiff.“

Invisible Man (1952)

This simple but powerful opening statement comes from an unnamed black male protagonist in his third year at an unnamed all-black college. Now regarded as one of modern literature’s most powerful opening lines, Ellison almost tossed his first draft in the wastepaper basket as soon as he first typed it. Reflecting on that exact moment in a 1979 essay, he said his first reaction was to view the line as “an assertion so outrageous and unrelated to anything I was trying to write that I snatched it from the machine and was about to destroy it.“ He added, “But then, rereading it, I became intrigued. And as I sat musing, the words began to sound with a familiar timbre of voice.“

When Ellison returned to his typewriter, he stayed with the opening line and had his protagonist continue: “No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.“ The novel went on to win the 1953 National Book Award for Fiction.

Heartburn (1983)

The narrator is Rachel Samstat, a New York City food writer who is married to a journalist with a reputation for womanizing. In her opening words, she chooses a most interesting way to disclose her reaction to the news that her husband has begun an extra-marital affair (Heartburn is a novel, but it reflects many of the details of Ephron’s four-year marriage to journalist Carl Bernstein).

In the first paragraph, Samstat continued: “Well, you had to be there, as they say, because when I put it down on paper it doesn’t sound funny. But what made it funny (trust me) is the word ’date,’ which when you say it out loud at the end of a sentence has a wonderful teenage quality, and since I am not a teenager (okay, I’m thirty-eight), and the reason I was hardly in a position to date on first learning that my second husband had taken a lover was that I was seven months pregnant.”

The Plague of Doves (2008)

This is the dramatic first sentence of “Solo” a preliminary piece—a kind of preface—that was so powerful I had to put the book down before reading on. I won’t provide the rest of it here, but let me say that it would be well worth your while to read it for yourself. It’s one of the most arresting book beginnings I’ve ever read.

Erdrich’s novel was based on a real-life crime that happened in rural North Dakota in the 1890s. A finalist for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize, the novel went on to win the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, an American literary award honoring books that have made an important contribution to understanding racism and celebrating human diversity.

In a 2008 New York Times review, Michiko Kakutani wrote: “With The Plague of Doves, [Erdrich] has written what is arguably her most ambitious, and in many ways, her most deeply affecting work yet.”

The Sentence (2021)

The narrator, a middle-aged Native American woman named Tookie, continued: “The first word I looked up was the word ‘sentence.’ I had received an impossible sentence of sixty years from the lips of a judge who believed in an afterlife. So the word with its yawning c, belligerent little e’s, with its hissing sibilants and double n’s, this repetitive bummer of a word made of slyly stabbing letters that surrounded an isolate human t, this word was in my thoughts every moment of the day. Without a doubt, had the dictionary not arrived, this light word that lay so heavily upon me would have crushed me, or what was left of me after the strangeness of what I’d done.”

Erdrich’s most recent novel covered a lot of ground—COVID, the murder of George Floyd, systemic racism, a bookstore-haunting ghost named Flora—but the most enduring theme is suggested in the opening words. Writer Malcolm Jones (Little Boy Blues and others) summarized that theme beautifully in a New York Times book review: “Set in a bookstore, narrated by a bookseller whose former life in prison was turned around when she discovered books and began to read ‘with murderous attention,’ The Sentence testifies repeatedly to the power books possess to heal us and, yes, to change our lives. It may be that, as Tookie argues, ‘books contain everything worth knowing except what ultimately matters.’ But that harsh judgment notwithstanding, there are books, like this one, that while they may not resolve the mysteries of the human heart, go a long way toward shedding light on our predicaments. In the case of The Sentence, that’s plenty.” The opening words were so special that I included them in my Smerconish.com compilation of The Best Opening Lines of 2021 (see the post here).

The Law of Love (1995)

The narrator continued: “That is why Hernán Cortés decided to construct a new city upon the ruins of the ancient Tenochtitlán. The time it took him to size up the situation was the same that it takes a firmly gripped sword to pierce the skin of the chest and reach the center of the heart: one second. But in time of battle, a split second can mean escaping the sword or being run through by it.”

The Virgin Suicides (1993)

In Book Lust to Go (2010), American librarian Nancy Pearl described The Virgin Suicides as a “wonderful first novel” and wrote about the author: “Detroit native Jeffrey Eugenides has a talent for knock-your-socks-off first lines.” I agree. The opening paragraph is packed with disturbing, but enticingly interesting information about the Lisbon family. Reading that dazzling opener for the first time many years ago, there’s no way I could’ve put the book down.

The novel’s first chapter first appeared as a short story in The Paris Review in the 1990 winter edition, and went on to win the 1991 Aga Khan Prize for Fiction. Here’s how the short story opened:

“Cecelia, the youngest, only thirteen, had gone first, slitting her wrists like Cato while taking a bath, and when they found her, afloat in her pink pool, with her yellow eyes of someone possessed and her small body giving off the odor of a mature woman, the paramedics had been so frightened by her tranquility that they had stood mesmerized. But then Mrs. Lisbon lunged in, screaming, and the reality of the room reasserted itself: blood on the bathmat; Mr. Lisbon’s razor sunk in the toilet bowl, marbling the water. The paramedics fetched Cecelia out of the warm water because it quickens the bleeding and put a tourniquet on her arm. Her wet hair hung down her back and already her extremities were blue. S he didn’t say a word, but when they parted her hands they found the laminated picture of the Virgin Mary she held against her budding chest.“

In 1991, director Sofia Coppola adapted the novel into a film by the same title, with Kirsten Dunst as one of the Lisbon girls, and James Woods and Kathleen Turner as the parents.

Middlesex (2002)

It’s hard to imagine a better opening line for a novel that explores the topic of intersexuality and gender identity. The words come from narrator and protagonist Cal Stephanides.

In a 2004 “Reading Matters” blog post, Kim Forrester captured my own reaction to the novel’s opening words by writing, “How could you not be intrigued?” About the story, Forrester continued: “The narrator, Calliope Helen Stephanides, tells an amazingly entertaining story, tracing not only her own incredible history but that of her entire family’s, beginning with her emigre grandparents, who have their own secrets to keep.” The novel went on to win the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

One for the Money [book 1 of the Stephanie Plum series] (1994)

Opening lines often establish the “voice” of the narrator and protagonist, and with these plain-speaking words, the literary world was introduced to a feisty New Jersey bounty hunter named Stephanie Plum (she ultimately served as the protagonist of twenty-eight Evanovich novels, most of them bestsellers). About her spectacular opening, what female reader wouldn’t nod her head in approval. And what male reader would have the temerity to disagree?

High Five [Book 5 of Stephanie Plum series] (1999)

The opening words come from protagonist Stephanie Plum, who continued: “I’m a bail enforcement agent now—also known as a fugitive apprehension agent, also known as a bounty hunter. I bring ’em back dead or alive. At least I try. And being a bail enforcement agent is sort of like being a bare-bottom Barbie. It’s about having a secret. And it’s about wearing a lot of bravado on the outside when you’re really operating without underpants.”

The Trees (2021)

Normally, it is inadvisable for an opening paragraph to include a word that will send readers scrambling for a dictionary, but in this case, it seems quite fitting to insert a word defined by the American Heritage Dictionary as, “Absence of knowledge or awareness; ignorance.”

About Everett’s opening paragraph, Lorraine Berry wrote in a Los Angeles Times review: “The butt of the joke here is the white Establishment, reduced by Everett’s tropes and puns to a redneck laughingstock.”

Buried Mistakes: A Cry for Justice From Beyond the Grave (2014)

We normally think of a “hook” as a short, pithy sentence that opens a novel in a compelling, intriguing, or powerful way, but Ezpeleta’s novel—inspired by the stories of the “comfort women” the Japanese military provided their soldiers during WWII—proves that a hook can be much longer; in this case, the ten short paragraphs that make up the entire Prologue of the book.

Shoot (1973)

While some opening lines are almost universally hailed, most of the others appeal to some and fail to impress others. This one was never particularly special to me, so I was surprised to discover it was one of Stephen King’s favorites. In a 2013 interview with The Atlantic’s Joe Fassler, King described how important it was for writers to establish “a powerful sense of voice” in the very first line. He went on to offer a 153-word analysis of Fairbairn’s four-word opening:

“For me, this has always been the quintessential opening line. It’s flat and clean as an affidavit. It establishes just what kind of speaker we’re dealing with: someone willing to say, I will tell you the truth. I’ll tell you the facts. I’ll cut through the bullshit and show you exactly what happened. It suggests that there’s an important story here, too, in a way that says to the reader: and you want to know.

“A line like ‘This is what happened,’ doesn’t actually say anything—there’s zero action or context—but it doesn’t matter. It’s a voice, and an invitation, that’s very difficult for me to refuse. It’s like finding a good friend who has valuable information to share. Here’s somebody, it says, who can provide entertainment, an escape, and maybe even a way of looking at the world that will open your eyes. In fiction, that’s irresistible. It’s why we read.”

Silk Road (2011)

Falconer, a widely acknowledged master of the historical novel, is also a master of the opening paragraph. Few writers are as skilled at laying the foundation, setting the stage, and introducing an air of mystery or intrigue—all in a sentence or two.

The narrator continued: “His fellow monks carried him back to his cell and laid him on the hard cot that had been his bed for the last twenty years. He was an old man now and there was nothing to be done. His eyes had the cold sheen of death. A brother went to fetch the abbot so that the old fellow might make his last confession.”

Isabella: Braveheart of France (2015)

King Philippe of France is speaking to his daughter, Princess Isabella, about the man he has selected as her future husband, King Edward of England. The story takes an unexpected turn in the next paragraph when the narrator explains: “Isabella is twelve years old and astoundingly pretty, a woman in a girl’s body. She keeps her eyes on the floor and nods her head.”

The Unkillable Kitty O’Kane (2017)

It’s a powerful opening line, and a sad reminder of the tragic fate of so many unfortunate adolescent girls. In what Falconer described as a novel “inspired by true events,” the narrator continued: “Big boots he had, sturdy. Good kicking boots. She tried to raise her head from the straw, but it was too much effort. She turned her head sideways; her ma stood in the doorway, she had her apron bunched in her fist, Mary in her arms, Liam and Ann peering from behind her skirts. Sean sat in the corner, a moldy blanket over his head, sobbing. No help for her there.”

Stigmata (2017)

The narrator continued in the second paragraph: “The day had been mild, unseasonably so. The storm appeared suddenly, ink-black clouds broiling up the sky in the north, as the bells of Saint-Étienne were ringing for vespers. A blast of icy wind hit her like a slap as she ran across the marketplace, a blow so violent and unexpected that it almost knocked her off her feet.”

A Vain and Indecent Woman: The Scandalous Life of Joan of Kent (2018)

The narrator of the novel, the father of Joan of Kent, immediately piques our interest with the comment about never having had the opportunity to boast about his daughter. He then takes the story in a whole new direction when he continues:

“I was twenty-nine years old when I died.

“Died; I use the term loosely. I was murdered, but within the dictates of the law and with the full approval of the king, even though he was barely eighteen years at the time.”

Cry Justice [Book 4 in the Charlie George series] (2021)

Stark contrasts are a staple of Great Opening Lines, and this exquisite opener is one of the best from a master craftsman. It was also one of my choices for a Smerconish.com post on The Best Opening Lines of 2021 (see the post here).

The opening paragraph also contains a suggestion that more dark humor will be awaiting the reader—and that proves to be exactly the case. The narrator continued: “The dead man looked disconsolate. Reasonably so, in the circumstances, Charlie thought.“

Mosquitoes (1927)

Some opening lines are impressive at multiple levels. The sex instinct is quite strong in me, on its own, is a memorable line, but it takes on a special significance when it is embedded in a beautifully phrased observation about how human beings reveal themselves to one another.

Mr. Talliaferro is not some upper-class Englishman, but an American lingerie salesman who has attempted to construct a sophisticated persona. He continued with words that draw the reader in more deeply: “Frankness, without which there can be no friendship, without which two people cannot really ever ‘get’ each other, as you artists say.”

The Sound and the Fury (1929)

The opening words immediately suggest someone surreptitiously witnessing a fight, and that is almost certainly what Faulkner intended. Reading on, though, we discover that narrator Benjamin “Benjy” Compson, a 33-year-old intellectually disabled man, is peeking through a fence at a group of golfers. It turns out that eavesdropping on golfers is a frequent and pleasurable pastime for Benjy. His sister is named “Caddy,” and he dearly loves to hear golfers use her name as they call out “caddie!“ to those carrying their golf bags.

The novel’s title is taken from a famous soliloquy by the title character in Shakespeare’s Macbeth: “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player/That struts and frets his hour upon the stage/And then is heard no more; it is a tale/Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,/Signifying nothing.”

Because the novel opens with Benjy’s narration, many early readers believed he was the idiot telling the tale, but other Compson family members—Quentin and Jason—narrated later sections of the novel, and critics have pointed out that their stream-of-consciousness narratives also displayed ample illustrations of idiocy.

When the book was published, noted critic Clifton Fadiman dismissed the novel as “trivial,” but it is now regarded as an American classic (in 1998, the Modern Library ranked it Number 6 on its list of “The 100 Best English-Language novels of the 20th Century”).

Intruder in the Dust (1948)

The Mansion (1959)

The man in question is Mink Snopes, who’s been on trial for murder. The idea of a defendant not listening to a jury’s verdict or a judge’s sentencing is so unexpected it compels our attention and makes us wonder: what on earth could have been so monumentally distracting to him?

Sometimes I Lie (2018)

After sixteen years as a producer and reporter for the BBC, Feeney decided at age 30 to pursue her childhood dream of becoming a writer—and it’s hard to imagine a better way to begin her debut novel. In a Shelf Awareness review, Elyse Dinh-McCrillis wrote: “Fans of psychological thrillers won’t be able to stop reading” after the gripping opening words.

Amber is a thirty-five-year-old British woman who awakens in a hospital room. Aware of everything going on around her, she quickly deduces she is in a coma of some sort, unable to move, speak, or even open her eyes. As she tries to makes sense of her situation, she begins to suspect her husband of foul play.

In a Shelf Awareness interview with Elyse Dinh-McCrillis, Feeney was asked to describe herself using the same “template” that Amber Reynolds used at the beginning of Sometimes I Lie. She replied:

“My name is Alice Feeney. There are three things you should know about me:

1. I write dark and twisty novels.
2. I also love to cook.
3. Sometimes I bake.“

So Big (1924)

This opening line suggests a child who has struggled mightily under the weight of an onerous nickname, and for me, it immediately brought to mind William Hazlitt’s famous observation on the subject: “A nickname is the hardest stone that the devil can throw at a man.” In this story, Dirk DeJong was so big as an infant that his mother described him as “so-o-o-o big”—and the expression stuck.

The narrator continued: “From So Big (of fond and infantile derivation) it had been condensed into Sobig. And Sobig DeJong, in all its consonantal disharmony, he had remained until he was a ten-year-old schoolboy in that incredibly Dutch district southwest of Chicago known first as New Holland and later as High Prairie. At ten, by dint of fists, teeth, copper-toed boots, and temper, he earned the right to be called by his real name, Dirk Dejong.”

While Ferber was writing the novel, she had serious misgivings about its worthiness, and even worried it might diminish her reputation (when she submitted the final manuscript to her publisher, she wrote: “I think its publication as a book would hurt you, as publishers, and me as an author”). She couldn’t have been more mistaken. So Big went on to become the Number One bestselling novel of the year and the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1925.

Giant (1952)

Looking up from a terminal in Texas’s brand-new Jett Rink Airport, the narrator is witnessing a sky filled with airplanes. Instead of being filled with bombs or munitions, though, these many private jets contain luxurious items and luxurious people, all invited to the Grand Opening of the airport.

The first paragraph continues: “They were merely private vehicles bearing nice little alligator jewel cases and fabulous gowns and overbred furs. No sordid freight sullied these four-engined family jobs whose occupants were Dallas or Houston or Vientecito or Waco women in Paris gowns from Neiman-Marcus; and men from Amarillo or Corpus Christi or San Angelo or Benedict in boots and Stetsons and shirt sleeves.”

In 1956, the novel was adapted into one of the biggest movies of the year (it received nine Oscar nominations, winning one for George Stevens as Best Director). Now regarded as a Hollywood classic, the film had an all-star cast headed by Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, and James Dean (in his last screen role).

Ice Palace (1958)

It sometimes happens that a memorable metaphor can elevate a so-so opening paragraph into a great one, and that is what we see here with the words pregnant with purpose. In the first paragraph, the narrator continued:

“Each, making his or her way along the bustling business street, seemed actually to bounce with youth and vitality.”

Troubling Love (1992)

The Days of Abandonment (2002)

Olga is a stay-at-home mother of two in what she regards as a reasonably happy fifteen-year marriage. About her husband Mario, she continued: “He talked for a long time about our fifteen years of marriage, about the children, and admitted that he had nothing to reproach us with, neither them nor me. He was composed, as always, apart from an extravagant gesture of his right hand when he explained to me, with a childish frown, that soft voices, a sort of whispering, were urging him elsewhere. Then he assumed the blame for everything that was happening and closed the front door carefully behind him, leaving me turned to stone beside the sink.”

The Story of a New Name [Book 2 of The Neapolitan Novels] (2012)

The narrator is Elena Greco a lifelong friend of Lila’s. She continued: “I carried off the box without comment, apart from some ironic allusions to the excessive amount of string she had tied around it.”

The Lying Life of Adults (2020)

The narrator is 13-year-old Giovanna, an Italian adolescent who is recalling a long-ago event that continues to sting despite her father’s later apologetic explanation. She continued: “The sentence was uttered under his breath, in the apartment that my parents, newly married, had bought at the top of Via Dan Giacomo dei Capri, in Rione Alto.”

The Eyre Affair (2001)

The words come from protagonist and narrator Thursday Next, the daughter of Wednesday Next and her husband Colonel Next, a former official in a British Special Operations Unit known as The ChronoGuard. She continued: “I don’t mean he was ugly or anything; it was a phrase the ChronoGuard used to describe someone who had the power to reduce time to an ultraslow trickle.”

Joseph Andrews (1742)

This is one of literary history’s most admired opening lines, and it came in Fielding’s first full-length novel, published when he was thirty-five (the full original title was: Joseph Andrews, or The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and of his Friend Mr. Abraham Adams). Fielding said he wrote the novel as a “comic epic in prose,” and the cover of the book announced that it was “Written in imitation of Cervantes, author of Don Quixote.”

The novel’s opening sentence has the quality of a Grand Declaration, and the narrator continues the lofty tone in the remainder of the opening paragraph: “And if this be just in what is odious and blameable, it is more strongly so in what is amiable and praiseworthy. Here emulation most effectually operates upon us, and inspires our imitation in an irresistible manner. A good man therefore is a standing lesson to all his acquaintance, and of far greater use in that narrow circle than a good book.“

Postcards from the Edge (1987)

The words come from protagonist and narrator Suzanne Vale, an aspiring actress whose bipolar disorder becomes life-threatening when it is fueled by alcohol and drug abuse. Vale was a thinly-disguised version of the author, and the novel colorfully recounts numerous elements of her reckless life (after Fisher’s death in 2016, the Washington Post wrote: “The book’s opening line could stand in as a nutshell summary of Ms. Fisher’s problems—and humor”). In the novel’s first paragraph, Vale continued:

“Besides, what was I supposed to do? He came up to my room and gave me that dumb stuffed animal that looks like a thumb, and there I was lying in bed twelve hours after an overdose. I wasn’t feeling my most attractive. I’d thrown up scallops and Percodan on him the night before in the emergency room. I thought that it would be impolite to refuse to give him my number. He probably won’t call anyway. No one will ever call me again.”

In 1990, Mike Nichols adapted the novel into film, with Meryl Streep playing the lead role and Shirley MacLaine her mother. In a 2106 Entertainment Weekly interview, Fisher was asked how the relationship between Suzanne Vale and her mother paralleled her relationship with her real-life mother, Debbie Reynolds. She replied: “I wrote about a mother actress and a daughter actress. I’m not shocked that people think it’s about me and my mother. It’s easier for them to think I have no imagination for language, just a tape recorder with endless batteries”

The Best Awful There Is (2004)

In this sequel to Postcards from the Edge, Fisher continues to explore the twists and turns of protagonist Suzanne Vale—and she opens it in a most memorable way. When the book came out in paperback in 2005, the title was shortened to The Best Awful.

This Side of Paradise (1920)

This was Fitzgerald’s debut novel—a heavily autobiographical tale written in large part to impress a beautiful young woman named Zelda Sayre—and it begins in an intriguing and strangely graceful way. From the outset, we get the clear impression that we’re in the hands of a confident writer who knows exactly what he’s doing.

The narrator continued: “His father, an ineffectual, inarticulate man with a taste for Byron and a habit of drowsing over the Encyclopedia Britannica, grew wealthy at thirty through the death of two elder brothers, successful Chicago brokers, and in the first flush of feeling that the world was his, went to Bar Harbor and met Beatrice O’Hara. In consequence, Stephen Blaine handed down to posterity his height of just under six feet and his tendency to waver at crucial moments, these two abstractions appearing in his son Amory.”

By the way, Fitzgerald’s romantic ploy worked. A year earlier, southern debutante Zelda had rejected him because of his questionable financial prospects. When the book became an immediate sensation—indeed, almost a cultural event—she quickly accepted his proposal of marriage.

The Great Gatsby (1925)

The opening words come from narrator and protagonist Nick Carraway, and they now enjoy an almost legendary status among literature lovers. Here’s what Maureen Corrigan, the longtime book critic for NPR’s “Fresh Air,” had to say about them in So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why it Endures (2014):

“That little speech should clue us in on how much breeding is going to count in this novel—as well as on just how slippery the meaning of The Great Gatsby is going to be. Indeed, the thick ambiguity of Gatsby’s language is one of the reasons why, despite its scant number of pages, it reads like a much longer story. Are we supposed to think that Nick is a prig for introducing his pedigree to us? Are we supposed to give him points for being aware of his own class privileges and acknowledging his social empathy? Whatever impression Nick wants to make, the novel has opened by trumpeting its obsessive subject: class. We might as well be in the turn-of-the-century New York City of Edith Wharton.”

The Last Tycoon (1941)

In December of 1940, Fitzgerald died of a heart attack—at age 44—before he could finish his roman à clef of the legendary film producer Irving Thalberg. His friend Edmund Wilson stepped in to finish the novel, and it was published as “an unfinished novel” a year later.

Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe (1987)

A Cast of Vultures (2017)

The reflection comes from Samantha “Sam” Clair, a London book editor and amateur sleuth. In this third mystery novel chronicling the exploits of Clair, Flanders has her irrepressible protagonist continue with this explanation: “I opened one eye and took stock. Head, pounding. Brain, fried. Eyes swollen shut, mouth like the bottom of a parrot’s cage. Stomach—I decided it was better not to go there. I’m a publisher, and I’m smart, I didn’t need to inventory further. I was hungover, and, even worse, for zero enjoyment the night before.”

Casino Royale (1953)

Casino Royale was the world’s introduction to a British spy who bears little resemblance to the super-stud action hero later portrayed by Sean Connery in the blockbuster films produced by Albert Broccoli. It was also the debut novel for Fleming, a former WWII intelligence officer who wanted to write “the spy novel to end all spy novels.”

In the next paragraph, the protagonist is introduced: “James Bond suddenly knew that he was tired. He always knew when his body or his mind had had enough and he always acted on the knowledge. This helped him to avoid staleness and the sensual bluntness that breeds mistakes.”

In a 2012 Introduction to a reprint of the novel, British writer Alan Judd wrote: “What do these first few lines do? To start with, they take us immediately there. You don’t have to have been in a casino at three in the morning—as most of Fleming’s early readers wouldn’t have—to get the glamour and the tawdriness. We trust the guide who writes so casually but persuasively about soul-erosion, and we’re introduced to a man who, whatever else he may be, is human like us: he gets tired, while having qualities we might aspire to—he’s a calculated risk-taker, has a degree of self-knowledge, is decisive.”

Dark Places (2009)

The graphic and somewhat disturbing opening words come from Libby Day, the only survivor of the fictional Day family massacre in rural Kansas in 1985. From the outset, the book triggered memories of the real-life 1959 murder of the Clutter family, also in Kansas, and also described by a gifted writer.

A book review in London’s Daily Mail nicely captured the contrast: “Set in the bleak Midwest of America, this evocation of small-town life and dysfunctional people is every bit as horribly fascinating as Capote’s journalistic retelling of a real family massacre, In Cold Blood, which it eerily resembles.”

Gone Girl (2012)

The novel begins with an unusual set of reflections for a husband to have about his wife, but they are the thoughts of Nick Dunne about his wife Amy (about Nick’s somewhat bizarre meanderings, Barry Lancet wrote in a 2016 Criminalelement.com blog post: “The beginning of Gone Girl set the tone for a dark story about a dark marriage”).

What starts off as unusual moves in the direction of creepy as Nick continues: “And what’s inside it. I think of that too: her mind. Her brain, all those coils, and her thoughts shuttling through those coils like fast, frantic centipedes. Like a child, I picture opening her skull, unspooling her brain and sifting through it, trying to catch and pin down her thoughts. What are you thinking, Amy?”

As the novel progresses, Amy disappears and—not surprisingly—an air of suspicion begins to hover around her husband. After the book was published, many believed Flynn was inspired by the 2002 murder of Laci Peterson in California. While admitting some parallels, Flynn said she had not relied on any true crime accounts. Flynn also went on to write the screenplay for the 2014 film adaptation of the novel, starring Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike.

The Grownup (2014)

These are among the most arresting opening lines I’ve ever read, but I don’t expect to see them appearing in too many Top Ten lists anytime soon. Originally published as a short story under the title “What Do You Do?” it first appeared in Rogues, a 2014 anthology edited by George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois. After winning the 2015 Edgar Award for Best Short Story, it was retitled and published as a stand-alone book in 2016.

The unnamed narrator, a sex worker in a massage parlor, has given so many hand jobs over the past three years that she has been forced to retire because of a somewhat predictable medical condition: carpal tunnel syndrome. In the opening paragraph, she continued:

“For three years, I gave the best hand job in the tristate area. The key is not to overthink it. If you start worrying about technique, if you begin analyzing rhythm and pressure, you lose the essential nature of the act. You have to mentally prepare beforehand, and then you have to stop thinking and trust your body to take over. Basically, it’s like a golf swing.”

Term Limits (1997)

Even if an opening paragraph is not dramatic or compelling, it can still entice readers if it is an exceptional word painting. After reading this opener, I closed my eyes for a moment and visualized the entire scene with ease. We soon learn that the man torching documents is Scott Coleman, a former Navy SEAL who is described as “an assassin of assassins, an exporter of death, trained and funded by the United States government.”

In the early 1990s, after receiving a medical discharge from the U.S. Marine Corps, Flynn was working in a commercial real estate job in Minneapolis when he felt inspired to write a political thriller. He quit his job, moved to Denver, and bartended at night while working on the book during the day.

After five years and sixty rejection letters, he decided to self-publish the book. When the book found an audience back in Flynn’s home state of Minnesota, Pocket Books came knocking, and published a hardcover edition in 1998 (a paperback version came a year later.) The book was hailed by critics, made the New York Times Bestseller list, and established Flynn as a major new writer. He went on to write twenty more novels, most of them bestsellers, before his premature death at age 47 in 2013 after a three-year struggle with an aggressive prostate cancer.

The Key to Rebecca (1980)

The narrator is describing a camel belonging to Alex Wolff, a fictional character based on the real-life WWII Nazi spy Johannes Eppler, an Egyptian-born man of German and Arab cultural heritage. Code-named “The Sphinx,” Eppler was described by the German General Edwin Rommel this way: “Our spy in Cairo is the greatest hero of them all.” The novel’s first sentence has long been admired by lovers of great opening lines, and The Last Camel Died at Noon even went on to become the title of a 1991 novel by American suspense writer Elizabeth Peters.

In the novel’s second paragraph, the narrator continued with this delightful observation about camels: “It was the five-year-old white bull he had bought in Gialo, the youngest and strongest of the three beasts, and the least ill-tempered: he liked the animal as much as a man could like a camel, which is to say that he hated it only a little.”

The Pillars of the Earth (1989)

These are the opening words of the Prelude to the novel. The narrator continued: “It was dark when the first three or four of them sidled out of the hovels, quiet as cats in their felt boots. A thin layer of fresh snow covered the little town like a new coat of paint, and theirs were the first footprints to blemish its perfect surface. They picked their way through the huddled wooden huts and along the streets of frozen mud to the silent marketplace, where the gallows stood waiting.”

The Armor of Light (2023)

Follett has crafted some memorable opening lines in his career, and it’s nice to see the old master doing it again. In this case, it is clear that something horrific has happened to Sal’s husband, and there is an unmistakable suggestion that the terrible event has taken his life.

Whenever an emotionally-loaded word like scream is introduced in the first sentence, it typically plays an important role in the plot of the story—and that is certainly the case in this fifth volume of Follett’s “Kingsbridge” novels (the first was Pillars of the Earth in 1989).

I was pleased to feature Follett’s opening words in my annual Smerconish.com post on “23 of the Best Opening Lines of 2023” (you can see the full list here).

Wildlife (1990)

In a 2012 New York Times review, Andre Dubus III wrote about this opening sentence: “This is an engaging voice: earnest without being morose; honest without being exhibitionistic; understated, humble and wise from years of trusting in questions more than in answers.”

Canada (2012)

In a 2012 New York Times review, Andre Dubus III provided some of the most complimentary words every written about a novel’s opening paragraph:

“On a purely plot-hungry basis, turning the page seems the only thing to do, but—as is so often the case with the fiction of Richard Ford—what actually happens in the story feels secondary, or at best equal, to the language itself. In the hands of a lesser writer, this can create problems: the prose begins to feel self-indulgent, written not to illuminate any truths but to please the writer, and in the process, story itself is lost and the reader is left behind. But Canada is blessed with two essential strengths in equal measure—a mesmerizing story driven by authentic and fully realized characters, and a prose style so accomplished it is tempting to read each sentence two or three times before being pulled to the next.”

The African Queen (1935)

These words introduce us to an English spinster who has joined her missionary brother in an Anglican mission in German East Africa. It is the beginning of WWI, and the German military commander has conscripted the mission’s entire native population. Rose and her brother are left alone to fend for themselves. If he dies, what will become of her?

In the opening paragraph, the narrator further communicates the gravity of the situation by continuing: “He was very, very weak indeed, and when he knelt to offer up the evening prayer the movement was more like an involuntary collapse than a purposed gesture, and the hands which he raised trembled violently. Rose could see, in the moment before she devoutly closed her eyes, how thin and transparent those hands were, and how the bones of the wrists could be seen with almost the definition of a skeleton’s.”

Rose Sayer is a multi-faceted character whose eccentricities, uptightness, and controlling tendencies are ultimately overcome by her feistiness, loyalty, and depth of feeling (the character was memorably brought to life by Katharine Hepburn in John Huston’s 1951 film adaptation of the novel).

The Beat to Quarters (1937)

The Beat to Quarters was the first of three novels (the other two were Ship of the Line and Flying Colors) that Forester adapted for the swashbuckling 1951 film Captain Horatio Hornblower, with Gregory Peck in the title role. Eventually, Forester wrote a total of eleven Hornblower novels.

The Jane Austen Book Club (2004)

This enigmatic opening line is an almost perfect way to begin a perfectly delicious novel. In the opening pages, the narrator goes on to describe what Jane Austen means to five of the six members of a Sacramento-area book club established by a never-married fifty-ish woman named Jocelyn (a control freak who breeds Rhodesian Ridgebacks, she delights in her role as a matchmaker, much like Emma Woodhouse).

Jocelyn quickly enlists her childhood friend Sylvia, who has been recently dumped by her husband, and her older friend Bernadette, an eccentric and multi-married 67-year-old. The fourth member she recruits is a forty-something college linguistics teacher named Grigg (we will learn later that they met a year earlier, and the report of their first meeting is quite Austenesque). Her choice of Grigg comes over the staunch objections of Bernadette, who fears a male member will prefer pontification over communication. But Jocelyn persists, believing that his growing up with three older sisters will make him a suitable member. Of the first four members, Grigg is the only one who does not have “a private Austen.”

The fifth member is Allegra, Sylvia’s gorgeous 30-year-old daughter, a kind of niece to Jocelyn, and an historically heterosexual woman who has lately been describing herself as a lesbian. The sixth and final member is a 28-year-old high school French teacher named Prudie. She is the only true-blue Austen devotee in the group, and the only currently married member, but she is currently questioning just how satisfying her marriage is.

The book is comprised of six chapters, one for each of Austen’s novels. For those who might need it, the final portion of the book contains helpful summaries of each one.

In a New York Times review, writer and word maven Patricia T. O’Conner described the book as “a perfectly cut and polished little gem with just enough facets. But that’s not the half of it. This exquisite novel is bigger and more ambitious than it appears. It’s that rare book that reminds us what reading is all about.”

In 2007, the novel was adapted into a film with an impressive ensemble cast, headed by Naomi Watts, Emily Blunt, Kathy Baker, and Amy Brenneman. While the film takes significant departures from the novel, it was equally enjoyable—and ended up being one of my favorite films of the year.

The Collector (1963)

The opening words end in an unsettling way, and they take an eerie—even ominous—turn as the narrator, a shy and socially inept English man named Frederick Clegg, continues: “When I had a free moment from the files and ledgers I stood by the window and used to look down over the road over the frosting and sometimes I’d see her. In the evening I marked it in my observations diary, at first with X, and then when I knew her name with M.”

The Collector is a dark and disturbing debut novel about a disturbed butterfly collector who kidnaps (in his mind, he “collects”) a young art student named Miranda Grey and keeps her captive in his basement. In a New York Times review, Alan Pryce-Jones wrote: “There is not a page in this first novel which does not prove that its author is a master storyteller.” In 1965, William Wyler adapted the novel into an Oscar-nominated film starring Samantha Eggar (and she received an Oscar nomination for Best Actress).

Proof (1985)

The words come from Tony Beach, a young wine merchant whose wife died six months earlier. He continued: “Ah well, they say, he’ll get over it. There’s always another pretty lady. Time’s a great healer, they say. No doubt they’re right. But oh dear God…the emptiness in my house.”

Straight (1989)

The narrator is Derek Franklin, an English steeplechase racer whose career is being threatened by a number of recent injuries. It looks like his financial worries might be over when he becomes the sole inheritor of his deceased brother’s estate—but it’s just the beginning of his troubles.

The Corrections (2001)

Franzen opens the novel with a time-honored gambit—in this case, quite literally warning readers that something terrible is soon to happen.

The novel, Franzen’s second, was hailed by critics from the day it was published, and few were surprised when Oprah Winfrey selected it for her Book Club. After Franzen expressed ambivalence about being associated with some of the “schmaltzy” books Winfrey had previous selected, she rescinded her invitation to have him appear on her television show. It was a mild and momentary kerfuffle, however, and almost completely forgotten when the book won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2001 and named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2002.

Strong Motion (2010)

This is the entire first paragraph of the novel, and it immediately raises an important question: what must have happened in Eileen’s early life that would cause her to hesitate when asked such a simple and straightforward question?

Crossroads (2021)

This is a soft opening, but it nicely sets the stage for an opening paragraph that ends with a most enticing line:

“A certain person, Mrs. Frances Cottrell, a member of the church, had volunteered to help him bring toys and canned goods to the Community of God that afternoon, and though he knew that only as her pastor did he have a right to rejoice in her act of free will, he couldn’t have asked for a better Christmas present than four hours alone with her.”

Cold Mountain (1997)

As Confederate soldier W. P. Inman lies in a makeshift military hospital near Raleigh, North Carolina, he awakens to the sensation of flies zeroing like dive bombers on a gaping wound in his neck. It’s a grisly but captivating opening.

Frazier’s debut novel went on to become a surprise best-seller, with worldwide sales of over three million copies. In a New York Times review, James Polk wrote: “For a first novelist, in fact for any novelist, Charles Frazier has taken on a daunting task—and done extraordinarily well by it. In prose filled with grace notes and trenchant asides, he has reset much of the Odyssey in 19th-century America, near the end of the Civil War.”

The book was awarded the 1997 National Book Award for Fiction. In 2003, the novel was adapted into a film of the same title, starring Jude Law, Nicole Kidman, and Renée Zellweger (who won a Best Supporting Actress for her role.)

The Women’s Room (1977)

This is the opening sentence of one of the most influential novels in the history of the feminist movement. The book quickly became a New York Time best-seller and ultimately sold over 20 million copies in over 20 different languages. In a 2009 New York Times obituary, Gloria Steinem was quoted as saying that the book “expressed the experience of a huge number of women and let them know that they were not alone and not crazy.”

The intriguing first sentence described Mira Ward, an American wife and mother of two. In the middle of a conventional and unfulfilling marriage to her husband Norm, a doctor, she sinks into a suicidal depression after he suddenly divorces her. As she begins to pull herself out of the deep hole she is in, she experiences a powerful feminist awakening after she enrolls in a graduate program in English Literature at Harvard University. In the opening paragraph, the narrator continued:

“She called it that, even though someone had scratched out the word ladies’ in the sign on the door, and written women’s underneath. She called it that out of thirty-eight years of habit, and until she saw the cross-out on the door, had never thought about it.”

Greenwich Killing Time (1986)

This is an impressive opening line in Friedman’s debut novel, and it only gets better as the narrator and protagonist, a fictionalized version of the author, continued: “A gift from a friend just back from Mexico. The worm was fat and white and somewhat dangerous looking with great hallucinogenic properties attributed to it. You were supposed to eat it and it was supposed to make you so high you would need a stepladder to scratch your ass. We’d see.”

Outlander [Book 1 of Outlander Series] (1991)

Voyager [Book 3 of Outlander Series] (1993)

I have a soft spot in my heart for oxymoronic opening lines, and this intriguing reflection describes the slightly disoriented James Fraser, whose eyelids are sealed shut from dry blood as he comes to consciousness in the middle of a casualty-filled battlefield. After removing a dead body that has been heavily draped over one of his legs, he senses hovering crows above and hears sounds of wailing from injured soldiers lying nearby.

The narrator says of him: “Memory flooded back, and he groaned aloud. He had been mistaken. This was hell. But James Fraser was unfortunately not dead, after all.”

Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone [Book 9 of the Outlander Series] (2021)

It’s been seven years since the last novel in the series—a period of time called a droughtlander by Gabaldon fans—and the Prologue of her most recent installment contains this eloquent description of an experience that will resonate with almost all readers. It was one of my choices for a Smerconish.com post on The Best Opening Lines of 2021 (see the post here).

American Gods (2001)

The novel begins with this introduction to Shadow Moon, a convict who is about to be released from prison after his wife has been killed in a car accident. About these opening words, sci-fi writer Philip Palmer said in a 2011 blog post: “Wonderfully restrained evocative prose, with a laugh-out-loud funny joke in the middle sentence. After this great start, the book gets even better.”

The narrator continued:

“The best thing—in Shadow’s opinion, perhaps the only good thing—about being in prison was a feeling of relief. The feeling that he’d plunged as low as he could plunge and he’d hit bottom. He didn’t worry that the man was going to get him, because the man had got him. He did not awake in prison with a feeling of dread; he was no longer scared of what tomorrow might bring, because yesterday had brought it.”

The Graveyard Book (2008)

In a 2018 blog post on “10 of the Greatest First Lines in Literature,” Svani Parekh wrote:

“Who can resist reading on? It’s an explosive first line that sucks a reader right into the plot. To me, this especially shows that ‘Start in the Middle of the Action’ applies not just to opening lines, but to the beginnings of stories in general. Start at a crucial point where the stakes are high. You can always flashback later to explain how your character got to where he is.”

This is Pleasure: A Story (2019)

Quin is a successful Manhattan book editor with a reputation for being something of a womanizer, The narrator is Quin’s colleague and friend, a woman named Margot. She continued: “He saw a melancholy-looking woman, a ‘former beauty,’ as he put it, walking by herself in Central Park, and he said to her, ‘Aren’t you the gentle one!’ She replied, ‘And aren’t you the perceptive one for seeing it!’ After a few minutes of talk, he invited her to have tea with him. She agreed.”

Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch (2021)

The year is 1619, and the opening words come from Katharina Kepler, an illiterate and curmudgeonly herbalist who, we will shortly learn, is also the mother of the renowned mathematician, scientist, and astronomer, Johannes Kepler. In this fictionalized, darkly comic portrayal of an actual 1620 witchcraft trial, Katharina’s son actually shows up at the proceedings to defend his mother against the charges.

The Silent Miaow: A Manual for Kittens, Strays, and Homeless Cats (1964; photographs by Suzanne Szasz)

This is the opening paragraph of a book that, in an “Editor’s Foreword,” Gallico said was written by a cat. According to Gallico, the manuscript of the book was left on his doorstep, and he originally thought it was written in some kind of cipher. The title, for example was:

                  £YE SUK@ANT MUWOQ
   Q Nabal Dir Kottebs Dra7d abd J1/4 N14dd ca6s

In the Foreword, Gallico said he set the book aside after failing in his first attempts to solve the cipher. When he returned to the book a few months later, the solution came to him in a Eureka! moment. He wrote:

“It was no code at all, and was never intended to be. People unfamiliar with the use of a typewriter produce a pattern of error that is repetitive. The above [title and subtitle] however, is a different sort of stumbling. It is exactly the kind of garbling that might be expected if the typewriter key were to be struck or depressed not by a finger, but by a five-toed paw, which in attempting to hit, say, the ‘a’ would spread out to cover the ‘q,’ ‘w,’ or ‘s,’ so that any one of those others might make the imprint instead of the vowel sought.”

Gallico’s Foreword also contained several other tidbits of interest, but I’ll leave them for interested readers to track down on their own. When the book was published, the titled page indicated that it had been “translated from the feline” by Gallico, a well-known cat lover and author of other cat-related books, including Thomasina, the Cat Who Thought She Was God (1957).

The Poseidon Adventure (1969)

This is the inviting opening paragraph of one of the 20th century’s most famous “disaster” novels, an edge-of-your-seat tale about a group of passengers attempting to escape from a capsized ocean liner before it sinks to the bottom of the sea.

After the novel was published, it was only a modest commercial success, but three years later the story took on a life of its own when it was adapted into a hugely popular 1972 film with an ensemble cast that included five Oscar winners: Gene Hackman, Ernest Borgnine, Jack Albertson, Shelley Winters, and Red Buttons. Released in December of 1972, the film became the highest-grossing film of 1973.

In Chancery [Volume 2 of The Forsyte Saga] (1906)

The narrator continued: “Through fluorescence and feud, frosts and fires, it followed the laws of progression even in the Forsyte family which had believed it fixed forever.”

The Man of Property [Volume I of The Forsyte Saga] (1906)

An upper middle-class family in full plumage is a magnificent metaphor in its own right, but when encased in a beautifully-crafted observation about a well-to-do English family, it makes for an unforgettable opening line.

Maid in Waiting (1931)

Two nieces and their one husband? I’m sure Galsworthy must’ve enjoyed crafting that phrase.

Brotherless Night (2023)

This is one of my favorite opening lines of the year, and it came within a nose of making my annual “Best of 2023” list. In a Storizen.com review, Swapna Peri wrote: “The narrative opens in New York City in 2009, with a striking first line that ignites the reader’s curiosity.” As the opening paragraph continues, the protagonist—a Sri Lankan physician named Sashi—also ends the first paragraph memorably:

“I met a lot of these sorts of people when I was younger because I used to be what you would call a terrorist myself.”

One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)

Opening lines don’t get much better that this one. In fact, in a 2014 Vox.com post, writer Max Fisher wrote a piece titled “Gabriel García Márquez Wrote the Greatest Opening Line to a Book, Ever.” He went on to add:

“The question of what constitutes the greatest first line to any novel in literary history is not something that can ever really be decided. But Marquez’s is surely as good a contender as any. It has been repeatedly ranked as one of the best, for example in 2006 by the American Book Review, which declared it the fourth-best opening line in literary history. The other top sentences, by Herman Melville and others, are worthy but ultimately unpersuasive competitors: for inventiveness, for vividness, and for the sheer force by which Marquez’s first line compels you to drop everything and go read his novel from beginning to end, there is no real equal.”

In Colin Falconer’s 2013 list of “The Best 43 Opening Lines in Novel Writing History,” he ranked the line Number Two. About it, he commented succinctly: “So many questions and all from just one sentence.”

Love in the Time of Cholera (1985)

For savvy readers, the phrase bitter almonds is always associated with a tragic end, and the desire to learn more naturally results. The narrator continued: “Dr. Juvenal Urbino noticed it as soon as he entered the still darkened house where he had hurried on an urgent call to attend a case that for him had lost all urgency many years before. The Antillean refugee Jeremiah de Saint-Amour, disabled war veteran, photographer of children, and his most sympathetic opponent in chess, had escaped the torments of memory with the aromatic fumes of gold cyanide.“

Memories of My Melancholy Whores (2004)

In a 2005 review in The Oxonian Review (titled “The Nonagenarian and the Nymphette”), Glen Goodman wrote: “For most readers, this opening line may smack more of Henry Miller or Vladimir Nabokov than of the perfumed, sensual prose of Gabriel García Márquez; but, like the Nobel Prize winner’s previous novels, the first sentence of Memoria de mis putas tristes (literally “memoir of my sad whores”) engages the reader while encapsulating the central motivation of the narrative. The book—García Márquez’s first work of fiction in a decade—details the nonagenarian narrator’s first encounter with actual love, revealing the late-blooming romantic hidden deep within himself.“

The Case of the Velvet Claws [Book 1 of Perry Mason series] (1933)

These are the words that introduced criminal defense attorney Perry Mason to the literary world (he went on to become legendary in the crime/mystery genre, featured in 82 novels and 4 short stories). The opening is so well crafted that, after only a few words, we already have a distinct sense about the nature of the man. About him, the narrator continued in a simple, but quietly elegant way: “That face seldom changed expression. Only the eyes changed expression. He gave the impression of being a thinker and a fighter, a man who could work with infinite patience to jockey an adversary into just the right position, and then finish him with one terrific punch.”

This first novel featured a formula that would be followed in almost all the novels to follow: one of Mason’s clients is wrongly charged with a serious crime (usually murder), only to have his lawyer dramatically reveal the identity of the true criminal in a courtroom proceeding. Six of the early novels were adapted into films in the 1930s, but Mason didn’t become firmly established in popular culture until actor Raymond Burr brought him to life in a CBS television series that premiered in 1957 and continued in both television and film iterations until Burr’s death from kidney cancer in 1993 (his final portrayal of Mason came in the 1993 television film The Case of the Killer Kiss, which was aired a few months after his death and dedicated to his memory).

Goldenrod (1984)

When I first came upon these opening words, I thought to myself, “Sounds like something Narcissus would say.” I also found myself wondering if the author had deliberately crafted the first sentence with this legendary mythological figure in mind. Sure enough, he did. In the opening paragraph, the narrator continued:

“I can stare for hours, without a minute of boredom. I take off my clothes and stand naked in front of one of those full-length mirrors and simply contemplate my body. It’s a narcissistic ritual—I don’t deny that—but it is more than mere narcissism. It’s like a religious ceremony. It expands my consciousness. It’s a form of transcendentalism.”

The opening words put us immediately into the mind of protagonist Ken Harrison, an 18-year-old high school senior who has it all. He’s smart, handsome, and, as the only male child in a household of eight children, has a mother who dotes on him. The star of the hockey team, he also has—of course—a beautiful girlfriend. As this young prima donna struts around the opening pages like a peacock, there’s a clear suggestion that his future may not be as idyllic as his past.

Inside the O’Briens: A Novel (2015)

Inside the O’Briens is a dramatic fictional portrayal of the onset and development of Huntington’s Disease in a Massachusetts police officer named Joe O’Brien. In a beginning note to the reader, Genova briefly described the disease and concluded about it: “It has been called the cruelest disease known to man.”

A Great Deliverance [Book 1 in the Inspector Lynley series] (1988)

It’s always a bit of a risk to use an unfamiliar word in an opening line, but solecism is such a delicious word that I was delighted to see George use it in the opening line of her debut novel. Almost always used to describe a grammatical mistake, the word is sometimes extended to mean a social faux pas or breach of proper etiquette—as we see here. In this case, the man committing the disgusting deed is Father Hart, a Catholic priest.

About the incident, the narrator continued: “He’d been holding it back for three-quarters of an hour, fighting it off as if it were Henry Tudor’s vanguard in the Battle of Bosworth. But at last he’d surrendered. And after the act, to make matters worse, he immediately began to snuffle.” [yes, she wrote snuffle]

A Great Deliverance introduced the literary world to Scotland Yard Inspector Thomas Lynley, and it did so in fine fashion, winning the 1988 Agatha Award for Best First Novel and the 1989 Anthony Award in the same category. Descended from English royalty (he holds the title of eighth earl of Atherton), Lynley and his partner in crimesolving, Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers, would ultimately go on to be featured in twenty-one novels. From 2001 to 2008, the first eleven of the novels were adapted into “The Inspector Lynley Mysteries,” a popular BBC television series, with Nathaniel Parker and Sharon Small in the leading roles.

A Suitable Vengeance [Book 4 in the Inspector Lynley series] (1991)

These two sentences form the entire first paragraph of the Prologue to the book. The narrator continued in the second paragraph: “Some floors above the rumble of nighttime traffic, her naked silhouette gargoyled against the wall of her half-darkened room, and she smiled as her movements made the shadow shift, creating ever new forms of black upon white like a Rorschach test. And what a test, she thought, practicing a gesture of come-hither quality. What a sight for some psycho!”

In the Presence of the Enemy [Book 8 in the Inspector Lynley Series] (1996)

What Came Before He Shot Her [Book 14 in Inspector Lynley Series] (2009)

Gathering Five Storms [Book 3 in The CIA’s Dangerous Clique series] (2022)

About the opening line, Gilion Dumas of the Rose City Reader was certainly speaking for me when she wrote: “Well, that’s a sentence that gets your attention.” The novel’s opener stands in stark contrast to most spy thrillers, where the central characters are often portrayed one-dimensionally, almost as if they had no regular human emotions. From the outset, we’re eager to learn more about the person named Katrina, not the agent/assassin by the same name.

The Spy Coast (2023)

This may appear to be a simple opening line, but for me it was simply delicious: a six-word sentence perfectly capturing the experience of countless aging people all over the world. In this case, the senior citizen is Maggie Bird, an apparently unexceptional chicken farmer in Purity, Maine. In truth, she is former CIA spy whose retirement goal—along with several other former spooks in “The Martini Club”—was to put her former life behind her. In the opening paragraph, she continued:

“How things have changed, she thought, staring in the mirror. Her hair, once artfully streaked with sun-kissed highlights, was now what could only be described as dead-mouse brown.”

About the book, David Baldacci wrote: “The Spy Coast is a marvelously plotted read with action-packed pages, g-force twists and turns, and a platoon of fascinating characters. I truly hope to see Maggie Bird and her team of silver-haired helpers on the pages again.”

Ellen Foster (1987)

If you will pardon the expression, this is a killer opening line. The words come from 10-year-old Ellen Foster, the victim of physical, psychological, and sexual abuse from her alcoholic father. In the opening paragraph, she continued: “I would figure out this way or that and run it down through my head until it got easy.”

The debut novel was hailed by critics from the outset, quickly became an Oprah Book Club selection, and eventually won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1997, the novel was adapted into a Hallmark Hall of Fame movie, with Jena Malone in the title role.

Neuromancer (1984)

About this classic opening line, Mark Nichol wrote in a 2011 DailyWritingTips.com post (“20 Great Opening Lines to Inspire the Start of Your Story”) : “Don’t expect any fluffy bunnies or fragrant blossoms or dulcet giggles to show up in this seminal cyberpunk story. A spot-on metaphor expresses the story’s nihilism, letting you know what you’re in for and lugubriously inviting you in.”

In addition to its acclaimed opening line, Neuromancer is also noteworthy for popularizing the term cyberspace and presciently imagining something very close to what we now know as the internet or World Wide Web. It was Gibson’s debut novel, and the very first novel to win the three biggest honors in the sci-fi genre: The Nebula Award, the Philip K. Dick Award, and the Hugo Award.

Many years later, Gibson offered one of history’s best metaphors on the subject of great opening lines. In “The Handshake,” an essay in Joe Fassler’s Light the Dark (2017), a brilliant collection of brief works that grew out of his “By Heart” interviews in The Atlantic, Gibson wrote: “The first sentence is the handshake, on either side of the writer-reader divide. The reader shakes hands with the writer. The writer has already had to shake hands with the unknown. Assuming both have heard the click, we’ve got it going on.”

Meant to Be (2022)

These opening words take on a special significance as soon as we realize they come from a fictionalized version of John. F. Kennedy, Jr. I was delighted to honor this soft-but-highly-evocative opening in my compilation of “The Best Opening Lines of 2022” on Smerconish.com (see the full list here).

In the opening paragraph, Joseph Kingsley III, a handsome young man from a famous American family, continued:

“I once read that it’s impossible to have memories much before the age language fully develops. Apparently, we need words to translate our experiences, and if memories aren’t encoded linguistically, they become irretrievable. Lost in our minds. So I’ve accepted that my vague recollections of the day he was put to rest at Arlington National Cemetery are fabricated—an amalgam of photographs, news footage, and accounts from my mother that were somehow planted in my brain.”

Great writers are valued in large part because they’re able to put into words—often beautiful or even exquisite words—the experiences and emotions most of us can express in only the most inarticulate or incoherent ways. Giffin’s fictional reimagining of the courtship and marriage of JFK, Jr. and Carolyn Bessette was so beautifully told that Vanity Fair reviewer Keziah Weir called her a “modern-day Jane Austen”

The Clockwork Scarab [Book 1 in the Stoker & Holmes series] (2013)

This first paragraph has an attractive element of intrigue, but it is what the young narrator goes on to say that implanted the “hook” in this reader:

“But as far as I knew, I was neither in danger for my life, nor was I about to forestall the death of another.

“Being a Holmes, I had my theories and suspicions as to who had summoned me and why.”

All in all, this is a tantalizing beginning, and a wonderful way to introduce readers to Mina Holmes, the niece of the world’s first consulting detective. And the tale only gets better when Mina meets—and teams up with—Evaline Stoker, the sister of Dracula-author Bram Stoker, to fight crime in Victorian-era London.

While composing this entry, I learned that Gleason’s work is part of a literary genre I was totally unfamiliar with: steampunk. You can learn more about it here.

The South Will Rise at Noon (1988)

In his 2007 writing guide Hooked, writer and writing teacher Les Edgerton offered this and a number of other exemplary opening lines “that grab the reader and pull him in with a firm yank into the story.” About this one, he wrote:

“Glover not only sets the tone here (ironic humor—this isn’t the usual response of a man who finds his wife sleeping with another man), he raises all kinds of questions with this opening. Questions no reader can resist reading on to find the answers to.” Edgerton went on to add: “Bottom line is, if you give the reader an unexpected response to an event, as Glover does here, you’ve got that reader in the palm of your hand.”

Flora (2013)

It’s common for an opening sentence to express the novel’s central theme, but it is rare for those opening words to be so eloquently expressed that they will likely find their way into a future edition of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. When I came upon this haunting opening sentence for the first time, I immediately set the book down and added the observation to my personal “Words to Live By” computer file. I now also regard it as the single best thing ever said on the subject of remorse.

The opening reflection comes from 70-year-old Helen, who is still tormented by memories from when she was ten years old. In the novel’s second paragraph, she pulls readers deeper into the story:

“That summer, Flora and I were together every day and night for three weeks in June, all of July, and the first six days of August. I was ten, going on eleven, and she was twenty-two. I thought I knew her intimately, I thought I knew everything there was to know about her, but she has since become a profound study for me, more intensely so in recent years. Styles have come and gone in storytelling, psychologizing, theologizing, but Flora keeps providing me with something as enigmatic as it is basic to life, as timeless as it is fresh.”

About the novel and the author, John Irving wrote: “Godwin has flawlessly depicted the kind of fatalistic situation we can encounter in our youth--one that utterly robs us of our childhood and steers the course for our adult lives. This is a luminously written, heartbreaking book.”

Lord of the Flies (1954)

Golding’s classic dystopian novel starts off innocently enough, but quickly descends into a dark allegorical tale about the moral degeneration of a band of English schoolboys stranded on an island.

A quarter of a century after the novel came out, Golding shared with an interviewer the story of the book’s inception. Sitting with his wife in front of the home fireplace, he looked over at her and said, “Wouldn’t it be a good idea to write a story about some boys on an island, showing how they would really behave, being boys and not little saints as they usually are in children’s books.” When she said, “That’s a first-class idea! You write it!” Golding concluded: “So I went ahead and wrote it.”

The Princess Bride (1973)

This is a spectacular first sentence, and it’s easy to understand why it has piqued the curiosity of readers for nearly a half century. When readers encounter this intriguing oxymoronic opening for the first time, most quite naturally wonder, “How can a book become a favorite if one never reads it?” There is a satisfactory answer to that question, of course, and it has to do with having a book read to you instead of actually reading it yourself.

As the novel unfolds, the distinction between fantasy and reality is blurred from the outset, with Goldman suggesting he is writing an abridgement of a classic European tale by a writer named S. Morgenstern (the full title and subtitle is The Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern’s Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure, the “Good Parts” Version). There is no such author, of course, and no classic book; it’s simply a literary conceit employed by Goldman in order to create a number of different ways the story could be interpreted and understood.

In 1987, Rob Reiner came out with a film adaptation that was only a modest success at the time, but is now regarded as a Hollywood classic (in 2016, it was added to the National Film Registry’s list of “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant films”).

The Vicar of Wakefield (1766)

Dr. Charles Primrose, the novel’s narrator and title character, continued with what have become legendary words on how to choose a wife: “From this motive, I had scarce taken orders a year, before I began to think seriously of matrimony, and chose my wife, as she did her wedding-gown, not for a fine glossy surface, but such qualities as would wear well.”

The Little White Horse (1946)

This is a lovely in media res (literally, “into the middle of things”) opening that ends with an important life lesson: different individuals find comfort and courage—and probably lots of other things as well—in different things. The narrator continued in the second paragraph: “Maria gazed at her boots. Miss Heliotrope restored her spectacles to their proper position, picked up the worn brown volume of French essays from the floor, popped a peppermint into her mouth, and peered once more in the dim light at the wiggly black print on the yellowed page. Wiggins meanwhile pursued with his tongue the taste of the long-since-digested dinner that still lingered among his whiskers.”

And, just to make sure her young readers got the message, Goudge continued in a third paragraph: “Humanity can be roughly divided into three sorts of people—those who find comfort in literature, those who find comfort in personal adornment, and those who find comfort in food; and Miss Heliotrope, Maria, and Wiggins were typical representatives of their own sort of people.”

After winning The Carnegie Medal in 1946, Goudge’s novel became a favorite childhood book for many Baby Boomers, including J. K. Rowling, who said in a 2011 interview: “The Little White Horse was my favorite childhood book. I absolutely adored it. It had a cracking plot. It was scary and romantic in parts and had a feisty heroine.” in 2008, the book was adapted into a film titled “The Secret of Moonacre.”

Perfect Tunes (2020)

The narrator continued: “It was the first song she’d ever written, so she didn’t understand how hard it was to write even an okay song, or how hard it was to make anything new, in general. She still thought, then, that making something was primarily a way to have fun.”

The One Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding (1962)

I first picked up this book after hearing the 21-year-old Bob Dylan praise it in a 1963 interview with Studs Terkel. I was a college junior at the time, and the opening paragraph immediately pulled me in. In addition to the Holden Caulfield-like quality of the narrator, I found myself intrigued by the very idea of “a fateful week-end” involving a young white guy and a black female prostitute (who, we later learn, turns out to be only fourteen years old).

In an Esquire review, Gore Vidal highly praised the book, writing: “Gover’s first stroke of inspiration is that neither boy nor girl can understand, literally, a word the other says. She speaks almost entirely in four-letter words and Negro-jazz argot; he speaks in ballooning Chamber of Commerce sentences which tend to pop just as some sort of meaning has begun to emerge from all that breath.” Vidal concluded his review by saying, “I hope this book will be read by every adolescent in the country.”

A is for Alibi (1982)

This was the first of Grafton’s “alphabet series” of detective novels, inspired by Edward Gorey’s The Gashlycrumb Tinies, a 1963 rhyming book in which English schoolchildren meet macabre deaths (“A is for Amy who fell down the stairs; B is for Basil assaulted by bears; C is for Clara who wasted away; D is for Desmond thrown out of a sleigh,” and so forth). “I was smitten with all those little Victorian children being dispatched in various ways,” Grafton told The New York Times in 2015, adding “Edward Gorey was deliciously bent.”

In writing the opening words to her first Kinsey Millhone novel, Grafton was almost certainly inspired by the first line of Ambrose Bierce’s 1886 short story, “An Imperfect Conflagration,“ where he wrote: “Early one June morning in 1872 I murdered my father—an act which made a deep impression on me at the time.“

B is for Burglar (1985)

In a WritersWrite.com interview with Claire E. White, Grafton might have been thinking about this opening line when she said: “With the mystery novel you have to know where you’re going, but not in any great detailed sense. I generally know whodunit, who died, and what the motive for the crime was. Then I have to figure out what I call the angle of attack. In other words, how do you cut into the story? Where does the story begin? What’s relevant in that first line or paragraph from the reader’s point of view?“ She concluded: “You would be astonished how long it takes me to figure that out from one book to the next.“

I is for Innocent (1992)

The narrator and protagonist, private investigator Kinsey Millhone, continued: “There was no beckoning white light at the end of a tunnel, no warm fuzzy feeling that my long-departed loved ones were waiting on The Other Side. What I experienced was a little voice piping up in an outraged tone, ‘Oh, come on. You’re not serious. This is really it?’”

O is for Outlaw (1999)

In a 2021 blog post, writer Greg Levin included this Grafton opener in a post on “25 of the Best Opening Lines in Crime Fiction.” About his selections, Levin wrote: “Few things enthrall me more than cracking (or clicking) open a novel and reading a first line that catapults me into Chapter 1. A line that reminds me why I read, why I write, what it means to be alive. A line that gives me whiplash. A line that makes me forget to feed my pets for the next few hours.”

R is for Ricochet (2004)

The question is posed by Kinsey Millhone, who is clearly in a philosophical frame of mind. She continued with an additional reflection—one that suggests her current mood might be the result of a boneheaded move she’s made: “The mistakes other people make are usually patently obvious. Our own are tougher to realize.”

S is for Silence (2005)

U is for Undertow (2009)

The opening reflection—now one of my favorite quotations about the past—comes from narrator and protagonist Kinsey Millhone.

The Tin Drum (1959)

The novel’s opening words come from Oskar Matzerath, a Polish man in his late twenties who is being confined in a mental hospital in the early 1950s. Is he a legitimate patient, or some kind of Cold War political prisoner? He offers a hint at the answer when he goes on to say: “There’s a peephole in the door, and my keeper’s eye is the shade of brown that can never see through a blue-eyed type like me.”

The Tin Drum was Grass’s first novel (his previous works were poetry, dramatic plays, and libretti for ballet), and he originally struggled to turn the ideas he had about the novel to words on a page. He struggled and struggled until the first sentence above came to him. After that, he reported, “The barriers fell, language surged forward, memory, imagination, the pleasure of invention, and an obsession with detail all flowed freely.”

I, Claudius (1934)

GUEST COMMENTARY from Jeff Jacoby, American journalist and Boston Globe Op-Ed columnist, who writes: “Even in a collection of great opening lines, this one by Robert Graves—151 words long—is masterful. The speaker is decisive, cynical, and candid. He introduces himself with a quintuple name that plunges the reader directly into classical Rome; the arch words that follow telegraph that a wild ride lies ahead. As indeed it does. Before this historical novel was published in 1934, Graves was best known as a poet and the author of a World War I memoir, Good-Bye to All That (1929). But I, Claudius—a novel written in the form of a long-lost memoir by the hapless, stammering, sickly, limping schlemiel who became the fourth Roman emperor—became a bestseller and Graves’s most famous work. Nearly a century later, it remains a classic of historical fiction.”

Jacoby has also penned some masterful opening lines. To view them, start here.

Looking for Alaska (2005)

In his debut novel, Green spun a captivating coming-of-age tale featuring Miles Halter, a young man with a peculiar fascination with the last words of famous people (as in “I go to seek the Great Perhaps” from Rabelais).

In the opening paragraph, Miles continued: “Although I was more or less forced to invite all my ‘school friends,’ i.e., the ragtag bunch of drama people and English geeks I sat with by social necessity in the cavernous cafeteria of my public school, I knew they wouldn’t come. Still, my mother persevered, awash in the delusion that I had kept my popularity secret from her all these years.”

The Fault is in Our Stars (2012)

The opening words come from 16-year-old Hazel Grace Lancaster, who continued: “Whenever you read a cancer booklet or website or whatever, they always list depression among the side effects of cancer. But, in fact, depression is not a side effect of cancer. Depression is a side effect of dying. (Cancer is also a side effect of dying. Almost everything is, really.) But my mom believed I required treatment, so she took me to see my Regular Doctor Jim, who agreed that I was veritably swimming in a paralyzing and totally clinical depression, and that therefore my meds should be adjusted and also I should attend a weekly Support Group.

A review in The Manila Bulletin said about the author’s opening: “Just two paragraphs into the work, and he immediately wallops the readers with such an insightful observation delivered in such an unsentimental way that it’s hard not to shake your head in admiration.“

We soon learn that Hazel uses sarcasm and dark humor as a way of coping with her own diagnosis of terminal cancer (about which, she says, “thyroid originally but with an impressive and long-settled satellite colony in my lungs”). While attending the support group, she meets a fellow patient named Gus, and their unfolding story becomes totally engrossing. In a Time magazine review, Lev Grossman recalled Hazel’s observation that “Cancer books suck” to write that this particular cancer book “does not suck. In fact, it is damn near genius.”

In 2014, the novel was adapted into a terrific movie, starring the enormously talented Shailene Woodley as Hazel. In a New York Times review, A. O. Scott wrote: “The film sets out to make you weep—not just sniffle or choke up a little, but sob until your nose runs and your face turns blotchy. It succeeds.“

Brighton Rock (1938)

About this opening sentence, English writer Julie Burchill wrote in a post on Stylist.com: “How simple is that line? How scary and straight to the point?”

In a 2016 “On Writing” post on TheConversation.com, Camilla Nelson, a Senior Lecturer in Writing at the University of Notre Dame Australia, was thinking about this line when she wrote: “It is the task of an opening sentence to pull the reader over the threshold into the world of a book. But the way they do this is often unexpected. They can start with an action, or better still, the dramatic foreshadowing of action.“ And when it comes to foreshadowing, Nelson wrote that the opening line of Brighton Rock was “difficult to beat.“

In the opening paragraph, the narrator continued: “With his inky fingers and his bitten nails, his manner cynical and nervous, anybody could tell he didn’t belong.”

The Power and the Glory (1940)

The Third Man (1949)

When most people think about The Third Man, they think about the 1949 movie—almost universally regarded as one of the greatest films of all time—and not the novella.

Believing that “it is almost impossible to write a film play without first writing a story,” Greene wrote a complete novella to fully develop mood, atmosphere, and characterization—all key elements he believed were difficult to convey in a screenplay. Even though Greene wrote in a 1950 New York Times article that “The Third Man was never written to be read but only to be seen,” his publishers decided to publish the novella when the film was released.

The End of the Affair (1951)

In this acclaimed semi-autobiographical novel, the narrator is Maurice Bendrix, an up-and-coming English writer who is having an affair with Sarah Miles, a married woman. In the opening paragraph, Bendrix continued on the subject of how—and especially when—to begin a novel:

“I say ‘one chooses’ with the inaccurate pride of a professional writer who—when he has been seriously noted at all—has been praised for his technical ability, but do I in fact of my own will choose that black wet January night on the Common, in 1946, the sight of Henry Miles slanting across the wide river of rain, or did these images choose me? It is convenient, it is correct according to the rules of my craft to begin just there, but if I had believed then in a God, I could also have believed in a hand, plucking at my elbow, a suggestion, ‘Speak to him: he hasn’t seen you yet.’”

The Captain and the Enemy (1988)

In Greene’s final novel, published when he was eighty-three, he crafts what may well be his very best opening line. The narrator and protagonist, an Englishman named Victor Baxter, continued:

“I can still remember the wetness of the gravel under my gym shoes in the school quad and how the blown leaves made the cloisters by the chapel slippery as I ran recklessly to escape from my enemies between one class and the next. I slithered and came to an abrupt halt while my pursuers went whistling away, because there in the middle of the quad stood our formidable headmaster talking to a tall man in a bowler hat, a rare sight already at that date, so that he looked a little like an actor in costume—an impression not so far wrong, for I never saw him in a bowler hat again. He carried a walking-stick over his shoulder at the slope like a soldier with a rifle. I had no idea who he might be, nor, of course, did I know how he had won me the previous night, or so he was to claim, in a backgammon game with my father.’’

In a New York Times review (titled “Father Lost Me in a Backgammon Game”), writer Brian Moore wrote: “The opening paragraph at once and magisterially upends us into Graham Greene’s universe.” Moore went on to add: “Won him? In a backgammon game? And who is this unlikely stranger who has come to claim his prize? In fewer than 20 pages we see the boy deftly abducted from his boarding school, introduced to the ways of a superb confidence man and taken, with his full consent, to live with Liza, a young woman who was once the mistress of the boy’s father. An author who can make us believe this scenario—and we do believe it—must be able to calibrate a precise balance between the unlikely and the plausible. But that, of course, is Graham Greene’s strength.”

The Dirty Duck [Book 4 in the Richard Jury Series] (1984)

The novel opens with an impressive metaphorical observation that also has a wry ring of truth to it. As the narrator continues, readers quickly get the comfortable feeling they’re in good hands:

“Tonight’s play had been As You Like It, and the faces of the crowd wore that disoriented look that said they hadn’t quite got their bearings, as if by some magical permutation the bucolic airiness of the Forest of Arden still glittered out here in the dark and the drizzle.”

Forrest Gump (1986)

With these words, we are introduced to one of the modern era’s most interesting fictional characters (brought to life by actor Tom Hanks in a 1994 film adaptation).

Gump continues his irresistible self-introduction in the novel’s second paragraph: “I been an idiot since I was born. My IQ is near 70, which qualifies me, so they say. Probly, tho, I’m closer to bein a imbecile or maybe even a moron, but personally, I’d rather think of myself as a halfwit, or something—an not no idiot—cause when people think of a idiot, more’n likely they be thinkin of one of them Mongolian idiots—the ones with they eyes too close together what look like Chinamen an drool a lot an play with theyselfs.”

In the 1994 film adaptation, starring Tom Hanks, the novel’s opening metaphor was changed to, “My mama always said, life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.” The movie version of the thought is the one that is best remembered today.

Water for Elephants (2007)

The narrator, ninety-something nursing home resident Jacob Jankowski, is about to embark on a remarkable reminiscence. Before jumping in, he continues: “When you’re five, you know your age down to the month. Even in your twenties you know how old you are. I’m twenty-three, you say, or maybe twenty-seven. But then in your thirties something strange starts to happen. It’s a mere hiccup at first, an instant of hesitation. How old are you? Oh, I’m—you start confidently, but then you stop. You were going to say thirty-three, but you’re not. You’re thirty-five. And then you’re bothered, because you wonder is this is the beginning of the end. It is, of course, but it is decades before you admit it.”

Ordinary People (1976)

This is one of my all-time favorite opening lines—a grand philosophical declaration with a dash of wit. In the opening paragraph, the narrator continued: “People in cars on busy freeways call to each other Boycott Grapes, comfort each other Honk if You Love Jesus, joke with each other Be Kind to Animals—Kiss a Beaver. They identify, they summarize, they antagonize with statements of faith: I Have a Dream, Too—Law and Order; Jesus Saves at Chicago Fed; Rod McKuen for President.”

The opening words are the reflections of Conrad Jarrett, a 17-year-old Illinois high school student who eight months earlier attempted suicide by slashing his wrists with a razor blade (six months before that, his older brother Buck was killed in a sailing accident on Lake Michigan). Recently released from a psychiatric hospital, the still-struggling Conrad is about to return to high school. The narrator continued about him:

“Lying on his back in bed, he gazes around the walls of his room, musing about what has happened to his collection of statements. They had been discreetly mounted on cardboard, and fastened up with push pins so as not to deface the walls. Gone now. Probably tossed out with the rest of the junk—all those eight-by-ten colorprints of the Cubs, White Sox, and Bears, junior-high mementos. Too bad. It would be comforting to have something to look up to.”

Guest’s debut novel, the book had not yet been published when galley proofs were brought to Robert Redford’s attention. He immediately saw its potential and flew to Minneapolis to personally secure the film rights. One can only imagine how thrilling it must have been for Guest, a 40-year-old former teacher and aspiring novelist, to open her front door and see Redford standing there with her book in his hands. In 1980, Ordinary People became one of the year’s most popular films, ultimately winning four Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director for Redford in his directorial debut.

Plays Well with Others (1997)

“He’s One, Too,” in The Practical Heart: Four Novellas (2011)

In this 2001 novella, the narrator continued: “Every few years, cops nabbed another unlikely guy, someone admired and married—a civic fellow, not bad-looking. He often coached a Pee Wee League swim team. Again we learned that the Local Man Least Likely to Like boys did!“

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003)

So begins the debut adult novel of a 41-year-old English writer who had previously penned more than a dozen children’s books. As the opening paragraph continues, readers are almost irresistibly drawn into the story by the intriguing “voice” of the narrator and protagonist, a 15-year-old autistic English boy named Christopher John Francis Boone:

“There was a garden fork sticking out of the dog. The points of the fork must have gone all the way through the dog and into the ground because the fork had not fallen over. I decided that the dog was probably killed with the fork because I could not see any other wounds in the dog and I do not think you would stick a garden fork into a dog after it had died for some other reason, like cancer, for example, or a road accident. But I could not be certain about this.”

From the day the book was published, it garnered the highest critical praise, and few were surprised when it was longlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Whitbread Book of the year. If anything, the novel’s reputation has only heightened over the years, with The Guardian ranking it Number 19 in its 2019 list of “The 100 Best Books of the 21st century.”

If the title of the novel has a familiar ring, it’s because you’re thinking of a famous bit of dialogue between Sherlock Holmes and a Scotland Yard detective in Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1892 short story “The Adventure of Silver Blaze.” Here’s exactly how it appeared in the tale 130 years ago:

“Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?”

“To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”

“The dog did nothing in the night-time.”

“That was the curious incident,” remarked Sherlock Holmes.

The Humans (2013)

From the outset, we surmise that the opening words are coming from a non-human—but that’s all we know for sure. And, as the narrator continues, we’re forced to concede that it may also have a wry sense of humor:

“For those that don’t know, a human is a real bipedal life form of midrange intelligence, living a largely deluded existence on a small, waterlogged planet in a very lonely corner of the universe.”

As the tale unfolds, we learn that the narrator is an extra-terrestrial who’s been sent to earth to learn more about human beings. To accomplish the mission, the alien protagonist assumes the form of Andrew Martin, a prominent mathematics professor at Cambridge University. Initially disgusted by almost all things human—especially their penchant for killing each other—the visitor from outer space gradually becomes accustomed to, and even impressed by, many of their unusual practices.

The Midnight Library (2020)

From the opening sentence, readers know the book will likely involve libraries and suicide, but few have a clue—at this early stage—as to where Haig’s speculative fiction novel is going to take them. The novel—a brilliant exposition of the theme of infinite possibilities—became an immediate bestseller and was shortlisted by the British Book Awards for the 2021 Fiction Book of the Year.

A Woman of Independent Means (1978)

In this classic epistolary novel—a novel told solely in the form of letters—the letter writer is 10-year-old Bess Steed, a fictional character based on the author’s real grandmother. The novel was Hailey’s first, published the year she turned forty, and it took the publishing world by storm. About the novel, Ann Tyler wrote in The New York Times:

“Bess is so memorable a character that I seem here to be reviewing not A Woman of Independent Means but the woman herself.”

Hailey adapted the novel to a one-person stage play in 1983, starring Barbara Rush. In 1995, NBC television produced it as a six-hour mini-series, starring Sally Field.

Under Cover of Daylight [Book 1 in the Thorn Series] (1987)

With these opening words, the literary world was introduced to a nineteen-year-old young man known only as Thorn (he would ultimately serve as the protagonist of sixteen Hall novels). Thorn’s parents died a few days after he was born, killed by a teenage drunk driver on the day they were returning home from the hospital. During his elementary school years, after learning that the killer had beaten the rap, young Thorn began thinking about how he would avenge his parents’ death.

The novel opens on the day of Thorn’s long-planned revenge and, once the deed is accomplished, picks up twenty years later. Thorn is now living in the Florida Keys, tying custom bonefish flies for a living, and about to get drawn into yet another revenge scenario, this time after the mysterious death of his adoptive mother. When the book was published, Hall was a professor at Florida International University. The founder of the school’s creative writing program, it must have been the thrill of a lifetime when he learned that Elmore Leonard, one of his literary heroes, had described his debut novel as “a beauty.”

Body Language (1998)

“The soft tissue of memory” is a memorable metaphor, and it perfectly caps off this beautifully-written opening paragraph. The narrator is describing protagonist Alexandra Rafferty, a photographic specialist with the Miami Police Department. Eighteen years earlier, at age eleven and shortly after she’d been raped by a seventeen-year-old neighborhood boy, the family’s pet dog Pugsy was found dead in the family’s front yard. Feeling certain her rapist was responsible, Alexandra confronted him in his home a few days later—armed with a .38 Smith & Wesson pistol she’d taken from her father’s bedroom bureau. When the boy leaped off his bed to subdue her, she stumbled, the gun went off, and the bullet struck him in the jaw, killing him instantly.

About the novel, James Patterson wrote: “Body Language seduces you, then it grabs you, and it never lets you go. This is a first-rate thriller by a masterful writer.”

Trickster [Book 16 in the Thorn Series] (2022)

GUEST COMMENTARY from Laurence Shames, bestselling author of The Key West Capers series and other books. About the novel’s opening words, Shames writes:

“There it is. In 34 words, none of them fancy, the author has introduced his hero, given us some waterfront atmosphere, let us know that the story at hand will reach into the deep past, and—most important of all—dropped the mysterious girl into our laps. Admirably efficient, but it’s in what comes after that Hall reveals the master’s touch. Having piqued our curiosity, he then throttles back into a leisurely five pages about fishing, fly-tying, the weather in the Keys, the zoning board (yes, seriously, the zoning board!) because he absolutely knows what every reader will be thinking and dying to find out: Yeah, but what about the girl? It takes consummate skill and confidence to handle these shifts in pacing, and James W. Hall is a magician with them.”

Shames has also penned some masterful opening lines. To view them, start here.

The Dain Curse (1929)

The opening words come from a nameless private detective known only as The Continental Op (the name comes from his work as an operative for The Continental Detective Agency). Hired to investigate a theft of unset diamonds from San Francisco’s wealthy Leggett family, the routine robbery case quickly turns into a murder investigation when the head of the family is found dead.

Red Harvest (1929)

In response to a 2013 query from the Atlantic’s Joe Fassler, American crime fiction writer Megan Abbot said that this was her “favorite first line” from a novel. A few years later, in a 2016 interview on Minnesota Public Radio, screenwriter and novelist Scott Frank assessed it similarly, saying: “It’s one of the best opening sentences in any novel anywhere.”

The Maltese Falcon (1930)

In the public’s eye, Sam Spade is now closely associated with Humphrey Bogart, whose slight frame and dark features made him a far cry from the blond, well-built private eye Hammett originally envisioned.

In a 1934 Introduction to a new printing of The Maltese Falcon, Hammett wrote about his famous protagonist: “Spade has no original. He is a dream man in the sense that he is what most of the private detectives I worked with would like to have been and in their cockier moments thought they approached. For your private detective does not—or did not ten years ago when he was my colleague—want to be an erudite solver of riddles in the Sherlock Holmes manner; he wants to be a hard and shifty fellow, able to take care of himself in any situation, able to get the best of anybody he comes in contact with, whether criminal, innocent by-stander or client.”

The Glass Key (1931)

Woman in the Dark: A Novel of Dangerous Romance (1933)

The Thin Man (1934)

Hard Light [Book 3 in the Cass Neary Series] (2016)

In a 2016 Washington Post review, Maureen Corrigan called this a “snap-to-attention opening line.” The words come from Cass Neary, a New York photographer with what might be described as a highly-checkered past (writer Katherine Dunn [Geek Love and more] described Cass as “one of noir’s great anti-heroes”). In the opening paragraph, Neary continued:

“In my case, that was through Customs and Immigration at Heathrow, where I stood in the line for EU travelers, praying I wouldn’t have to fake a Swedish accent as an impassive official ran a check on my documentation.”

The Four Winds (2021)

The exact nature of Elsa’s illness, the details of her dreams and fantasies, the specific novels that influenced her, and a number of other things as well, have not yet been revealed, but we’re eager to read on—and already rooting for the young, female protagonist.

In the novel’s second paragraph, the narrator further stirred the pot by adding: “On bad days, like today, she knew that she had always been an outsider in her own family. They had sensed the lack in her early on, seen that she didn’t fit in.”

The Book of Lost Names (2020)

These tantalizing opening words come from Eva Traube Adams, a semi-retired librarian who lives in Winter Park, Florida. In 1942, she was in graduate school when she fled Paris for a small town in the mountains and began forging documents for Jewish children seeking asylum in neutral Switzerland. In the novel, which was based on the true story of real-life forgers in WWII, Eva continued:

“It’s staring out at me from a photograph in The New York Times, which someone has left open on the returns desk. The world goes silent as I reach for the newspaper, my hands trembling nearly as much as it did the last time I held the book. ‘It can’t be,’ I whisper.”

She Rides Shotgun (2017)

If ever a first line deserved to be called a “hook,” this one most certainly does. In the opening paragraph, the narrator continued: “He lived in a room with no night. And he was to his own mind a god.”

The opening words begin “Chapter O” (yes, chapter O), a kind of prologue to the book, and they compellingly describe Crazy Craig Hollington, a thoroughly unsavory character who is serving a life term in Pelican Bay State Prison. He is also the leader of the Aryan Steel prison gang.

From the outset, She Rides Shotgun was hailed by critics, winning the 2018 Edgar Award for Best Debut Novel and an Alex Award from the American Library Association. A starred review in Booklist magazine said about the book:

“From its bravura prologue to its immensely satisfying ending, this first novel comes out with guns blazing and shoots the chambers dry. It’s both a dark, original take on the chase novel and a strangely touching portrait of a father-daughter relationship framed in barbed wire.“

Chapter 1 of the book also begins with a terrific opening line—a captivating description of 11-year-old protagonist Polly McClusky: “She wore a loser’s slumped shoulders and hid her face with her hair, but the girl had gunfighter eyes.”

American Duchess: A Novel (2019)

The stark opening words come from 18-year-old Consuelo Vanderbilt, heir to the family fortune. In a raw riches-for-title arrangement made by her domineering mother, she has been bullied into a marriage to England’s 9th Duke of Marlborough. She continued:

“Granted, I might have been watched like a hawk before—by a maternal hawk—but I had never felt my imprisonment in a gilded cage so strongly. Here I was on my wedding day, trapped in my bedroom with the door guarded by the biggest footman at the house so I would not flee.”

The Silence of the Lambs (1988)

Silence of the Lambs was the second Harris novel to feature Dr. Hannibal Lecter (the first was Red Dragon in 1981), and the first one to feature Clarice Starling. While the book was commercially and critically successful (it won the 1988 Bram Stoker Ward for Best Novel), neither Lecter nor Starling were widely known in pop culture until they were portrayed by Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Foster in Jonathan Demme’s blockbuster film adaptation in 1991. The film became the third film in Oscar history to win all of “The Big Five” awards: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, and Best Adapted Screenplay.

In the novel’s second paragraph, the narrator continued: “No one was in the outer office, so she fluffed briefly by her reflection in the glass doors. She knew she could look all right without primping. Her hands smelled of gun smoke, but there was no time to wash—Section Chief Crawford’s summons had said now.”

Hannibal (1999)

In a New York Times review, Stephen King wrote: “Harris, the Thomas Pynchon of the popular novel…is in charge of his story and his material from the book’s opening.” After remarking that Harris fans have been waiting eleven years for the “rematch” between FBI agent Starling and “the great fictional monster of our time,” Hannibal Lecter, King added: “It seems so much as if he has never been away, even in this first sentence.”

In the novel’s second paragraph, the narrator continued: “The strike force waited in three vehicles, a battered undercover van to lead and two black SWAT vans behind it, manned and idling in the cavernous garage.”

Damage (1991)

This is a magnificent first line—equally as good, in my opinion, as any of history’s classic aphoristic or epigrammatic openings. The words come from an introspective narrator who appears to be an older man reflecting on tragic mistakes he made not in his youth, but in his later, mature years. If you appreciate the quality of this first line, you will also likely appreciate the entire opening paragraph:

“There is an internal landscape, a geography of the soul; we search for its outlines all our lives. Those who are lucky enough to find it ease like water over a stone, onto its fluid contours, and are home. Some find it in the place of their birth; others may leave a seaside town, parched, and find themselves refreshed in the desert. There are those born in rolling countryside who are really only at ease in the intense and busy loneliness of the city. For some, the search is for the imprint of another; a child or a mother, a grandfather or a brother, a lover, a husband, a wife, or a foe. We may go through our lives happy or unhappy, successful or unfulfilled, loved or unloved, without ever standing cold with the shock of recognition, without ever feeling the agony as the twisted iron in our soul unlocks itself and we slip at last into place.”

Had he died at fifty, the narrator goes on to suggest, he would have been remembered as a doctor, an established politician, and a loving husband and father. But he concludes his opening reflections by saying, “But I did not die in my fiftieth year. There are few who know me now who do not regard that as a tragedy.” And with that remarkable conclusion, the reader is left wondering, “What exactly happened in this man’s sad life?”

Cressy (1889)

The Go-Between (1953)

Some opening lines go on to enjoy a life of their own as quotations, and this one has long held an honored place in The Big Three quotation anthologies: Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, The Oxford Book of Quotations, and the Yale Book of Quotations (in each one, it is Hartley’s only entry). Many quotation lovers—including me—consider it one of the very best things ever written about the subject of the past.

Hartley’s elegant observation is also regarded as one of the best opening lines in literary history. The American Book Review ranked it Number 78 on its classic list of “The 100 Best First Lines from Novels,” and writer Colin Falconer ranked it Number 20 on his 2013 list of “The Best 43 Opening Lines in Novel Writing History.” About it, Falconer wrote: “Wonderful metaphor, and so many questions arise from this simple sentence. You just have to know what he means and why the past is important to him.”

Stranger in a Strange Land (1961)

Given the longstanding pattern of bestowing unearthly names on beings from other planets, Heinlein immediately gets our attention by going in a completely different direction (his delightful “exception to the rule” opening is now regarded as one of the sci-fi genre’s most outstanding opening lines). The allure of the first sentence is also enhanced by the traditional once upon a time beginning.

In a 2014 SFSignal.com post on “The Best Book Openings,” sci-fi writer John C. Wright wrote about Heinlein’s classic opener:

“The contrast of the oddest of oddities, a Martian, and the most quotidian of names, Smith, is here on display. The reader’s eye is pulled as if magnetically to the next line to discover how a Martian can have so very terrestrial a name. Also present is the slightest hint of one of the philosophical points of the novel: Smith is not a man from Mars, for he is not a man at all, since by upbringing he is an alien. In other words, this story asks what it means to be human, and that opening line serves to establish the question to be asked.”

Stranger in a Strange Land is now regarded as a true American classic. In 1962, it became the first science fiction novel to make The New York Times Best-Seller list (later in the year it also won the Hugo Award for Best Novel). In 2012, the Library of Congress hailed it as one of 88 “Books That Shaped America.“

Catch-22 (1961)

Many readers were puzzled when this unspectacular opening sentence showed up on the American Book Review’s 2006 list of “The 100 Best First Lines from Novels” (it was ranked Number 59). In my view, it made the list not on its own merits, but because of the spectacular second line of the novel: “The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain he fell madly in love with him.”

While most writers do everything they can to avoid clichés—especially at the beginning of a novel—Heller was able to pull it off because he used it as a “set-up” for his inspired second line. In the ABR post, however, nothing was said about the second line, leaving many readers confounded by the inclusion of a hackneyed cliché in an article celebrating history’s best opening lines. In their compilation, the ABR editors made this mistake with some other entries as well, most notably the opening words of Sinclair Lewis’s Elmer Gantry (1927). See the Gantry entry here.

Something Happened (1974)

The opening words come from protagonist Robert Slocumb, a successful New York City advertising executive, who immediately explains: “Even at work, where I am doing so well now, the sight of a closed door is sometimes enough to make me dread that something horrible is happening behind it, something that is going to affect me adversely; if I am tired and dejected from a night of lies or booze or sex or just plain nerves and insomnia, I can almost smell the disaster mounting invisibly and flooding out toward me through the frosted glass panes. My hands may perspire, and my voice may come out strange. I wonder why.”

Given this glimpse into the mind of Slocumb, we begin to wonder if he is paranoid. Or suffering from PTSD? Slocumb, it turns out, is having similar thoughts. He begins the second paragraph this way: “Something must have happened to me sometime.”

The Sun Also Rises (1926)

The narrator and protagonist, a WWI veteran named Jake Barnes, continued: “Do not think that I am very much impressed by that as a boxing title, but it meant a lot to Cohn. He cared nothing for boxing, in fact he disliked it, but he learned it painfully to counteract the feeling of inferiority and shyness he had felt on being treated as a Jew at Princeton.”

A Farewell to Arms (1929)

In an October 25, 1998 New Yorker article (titled “Last Words”), writer Joan Didion hailed these opening words, writing: “That paragraph…bears examination: four deceptively simple sentences, one-hundred and twenty-six words, the arrangement of which remains as mysterious and thrilling to me now as it did when I first read them, at twelve or thirteen, and imagined that if I studied them closely enough and practiced hard enough I might one day arrange one-hundred and twenty-six such words myself.”

Didion went on to write that the power of Hemingway’s opening paragraph also came from what he left out, what she called “deliberate omission” and “the tension of withheld information.” To make her point, she asked, “In the summer of what year? What river, what mountains, what troops?”

A Farewell to Arms came three years after The Sun Also Rises and was Hemingway’s first bestseller, firmly establishing his reputation as a major American writer. The story was based on his own experiences as an ambulance driver in the Italian campaign in WWI. After being seriously wounded, he was cared for in a Milan hospital by an American nurse named Agnes von Kurowsky, and she ultimately showed up as the character Catherine Barkley in the novel.

For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)

This simple-but-beautiful opening sentence introduces us to Robert Jordan, an American university professor who has become an anti-fascist guerilla fighter in the Spanish Civil War. Assigned to blow up a local bridge, he surveys the countryside he must traverse in order to make his way to the target.

The narrator continued: “The mountainside sloped gently where he lay; but below it was steep and he could see the dark of the oiled road winding through the pass. There was a stream alongside the road and far down the pass he saw a mill beside the stream and the falling water of the dam, white in the summer sunlight.”

The Old Man and the Sea (1952)

The narrator continued: “In the first forty days a boy had been with him. But after forty days without a fish the boy’s parents had told him that the old man was now definitely and finally salao, which is the worst form of unlucky, and the boy had gone at their orders in another boat which caught three good fish the first week.”

Beach Read (2020)

We all have fatal flaws, but what makes them so dangerously self-destructive is that they’re almost always ignored, minimized, explained away, dismissed, or just plain denied. To see someone so readily admit to a fatal flaw, even in a novel, is unusual and refreshing.

The frank admission comes from January Andrews, a 29-year-old author of romance novels. After a taste of commercial success a few years earlier, Andrews is now broke and almost homeless. She continued on the subject of fatal flaws: “I like to think we all do. Or at least that makes it easier for me when I’m writing—building my heroines and heroes up around this one self-sabotaging trait, hinging everything that happens to them on a specific characteristic: the thing they learned to do to protect themselves and can’t let go of, even when it stops serving them.”

The opening line of Henry’s novel resonated so much with me that I selected it as one of “Twenty of the Best Opening Lines of 2020” in a Smerconish.com post (to be seen here).

People We Meet on Vacation (2021)

The opening words—which comprise the entire opening paragraph of the Prologue—come from a twenty-something travel writer named Poppy. In the novel’s second paragraph, she continued:

“Like a good book or an incredible outfit, being on vacation transports you into another version of yourself.“

Book Lovers (2022)

The opening words come from protagonist Nora Stephens, a witty but somewhat uptight literary agent. In the opening paragraph, she continues with an explanation sure to draw book-lovers further in:

“The tropes, the archetypes, the common plot twists all start to organize themselves into a catalogue inside your brain, divided by category and genre.”

When I read the opening sentence for the first time, the phrase you get pretty good at guessing where a story is going stood out for me, and I had a suspicion it would play a significant role as the story unfolded. Turns out, I was right— but you’ll have to discover exactly how for yourself.

The Secret Hours (2023)

This is such an unusual first sentence that it accomplishes the goal of all opening lines—it implants the hook. And the rest of the first paragraph is spent reeling the reader in:

“He’d encountered it on his morning walk down a green lane; had caught the odor without seeing the corpse, but had guessed what it was before returning later with a shovel. Whether they all smelled that bad or whether this one had expired of noxious causes he didn’t know. As it turned out, he couldn’t do anything about it either—the creature had crawled into a tangled nest of roots to die, and it would require heavy machinery and a strong stomach to recover it. Lacking the former, and not wanting to put the latter to the test, Max opted for a third way: he’d walk a different route for awhile, and see if one of the local farmers shifted it in the meantime. Which was why he wasn’t sure the badger would still be there a couple of nights later, when he was running for his life.”

Steppenwolf (1927)

Impatient readers might be tempted to stop reading at this point, thinking these are simply the meanderings of an aging, but contented man. But that would be a mistake. The protagonist, a middle-aged man named Harry Haller, continued:

“But, taken all in all, it had not been exactly a day of rapture. No, it had not even been a day brightened with happiness and joy. Rather, it had been just one of those days which for a long while now had fallen to my lot; the moderately pleasant, the wholly bearable and tolerable, lukewarm days of a discontented middle-aged man; days without special pains, without special cares, without particular worry, without despair; days when I calmly wonder, objective and fearless, whether it isn’t time to follow the example of Adalbert Stifter and have an accident while shaving.”

The Eagle Has Landed (1975)

This is the first sentence of the book’s Prologue, and it immediately brings the reader into the heart of the story. In the novel, the narrator explained: “It meant that a small force of German paratroops were at that moment safely in England and poised to snatch the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, from the Norfolk country house near the sea, where he was spending a quiet weekend.”

From 1959 to 1974, Higgins wrote thirty-four thrillers and spy novels—some under his real name (Harry Patterson), and others under a variety of pen names. The Eagle Has Landed was his thirty-fifth book and, after exploding on the literary scene, quickly outsold all of his previous novels combined (ultimately more than fifty million copies were sold). Now regarded as a classic in the spy/thriller genre, the novel was adapted into a 1976 film starring Michael Caine, Donald Sutherland, and Robert Duvall. Directed by the legendary director John Sturges, it was the fifteenth highest-grossing film of 1977.

Many people believe Higgins authored the popular phrase the eagle has landed, but that would be a mistake. The saying first appeared on July 20, 1969, when U. S. astronaut Neal Armstrong said it about the landing of the Lunar Module Eagle on the surface of the moon.

Strangers on a Train (1950)

Highsmith is, of course, best known for her novels and short stories, but she also wrote a well regarded non-fiction book on the writing of fiction: Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction (1966). On the subject of how to begin a book, she wrote in that work: “I prefer a first sentence in which something moves and gives action, rather than a sentence like, ‘The moonlight lay still and liquid on the pale beach.’” In her Strangers on a Train opener, she does that very nicely, setting the scene and also subtly suggesting that this is no ordinary train.

In 1951, Alfred Hitchcock adapted the novel into a film by the same title (Raymond Chandler was one of the film’s screenwriters). It received mixed reviews when it came out, but is now regarded as a film noir classic. The novel also inspired the 1987 black comedy Throw Momma from the Train, starring Danny DeVito and Billy Crystal.

The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955)

In this in media res introduction to one of her most fascinating protagonists, Highsmith demonstrates her agreement with an idea she would later write about in her 1966 writing guide, Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction:

“Some writers, assuming that a reader does not like to have his eye or brain taxed by a paragraph of thirty lines, prefer a short first paragraph of anything from one line to six.”

This Sweet Sickness (1960)

After the first sentence, we don’t know any of the specifics, but we already feel certain that no good end can come from a jealousy of this magnitude. The narrator continued in the novel’s second paragraph:

“He had lived so long with his jealousy, however, that the usual images and words, with their direct and obvious impact on the heart, no longer came to the surface of his mind. It was now just the Situation.”

I love it when writers talk about their own opening lines, and, according to Francis Wilson, in a 2021 New York Review of Books article (“The Hidden Bookkeeper”), Highsmith offered the following thought about how she chose to begin This Sweet Sickness: “I meant to give a mood of emotional tension, of stubborn plotting also, of a bottling up of a force that will one day explode.“

Freak (2013)

The spectacular opening reflection comes from a female escort who is describing a topsy-turvy work environment where the bosses “didn’t care if you did blow, but if you smoked a cigarette and the client complained you were done. Unlike cocaine, cigarettes weren’t considered a performance-enhancing drug.”

In the second paragraph, the narrator continued: “In a stall in the bathroom of the Sweet Chariot Inn in downtown Seattle, Brenda Stich (professional name: Brianna) shook out another line of the wondrous white powder onto the back of her hand and snorted. It took about three and a half seconds for the shit to kick in, and thank God for it. It had been a long three days with the guy from New York, and she was delirious with exhaustion. The bitterness dripped down the back of her throat and she swallowed. The coke coursed through her veins, and just like that, the world was back in high definition.”

Things We Do in the Dark (2022)

GUEST COMMENTARY from David Evans, a writer who lives in the woods of West Virginia on the western edge of the Shenandoah Valley. He writes: “I loved this opening line so much I ordered the book after reading such a grabber. In a New York Times review, Sarah Weinman found the first sentence especially appealing and surmised that Hillier must have had great fun writing it.” I concurred with Evans’s assessment and was delighted to honor her “hook” in my compilation of “The Best Opening Lines of 2022” on Smerconish.com (see the full list here).

In the novel’s second paragraph, the narrator continued: “Paris Peralta didn’t think to grab a sweater before they arrested her, so she’s only wearing a bloodstained tank top. It is July, after all. But the air-conditioning is on high, and she feels cold and exposed. With her wrists cuffed, all she can do is clasp her hands together and hold her forearms up to cover her breasts. It looks like she’s praying.”

Lost Horizon (1933)

This is a wonderful opening line, perfectly capturing the mixture of sadness and disappointment that has been experienced by countless middle-aged people over the years when they’ve had some kind of reunion with childhood or adolescent friends.

Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1934)

The opening words come from Mr. Chipping, an aging and deeply beloved professor at the fictional Brookfield School, an English boarding school for boys. The image of “lazy cattle moving across a landscape” is so unexpected—and so delicious—that we are eager to read on in search of similar morsels.

Originally published as a short story in British Weekly in 1933, it was reprinted as the lead story in the April 1934 issue of The Atlantic Monthly. The piece was so popular it quickly resulted in a book deal with Little, Brown and Company who published it at the height of the Great Depression in June 1934. A surprise best-seller, the novel was adapted into an acclaimed 1939 film starring Robert Donat (nominated for seven Academy Awards, it won only one, the Best Actor award for Donat). It would’ve likely taken home more awards, but it was competing against Gone With the Wind in all seven categories.

The Murder Bird (2006)

This is such a powerful opening paragraph that it’s almost impossible for me to envision someone reading it and setting the book down. But, for the sake of argument, let’s imagine you’re a hard-to-entice type. If so, perhaps the remainder of the first paragraph will win you over:

“Paul Hobden, a large, blubbery whale of a man, was sleeping off the effects of a boozy lunch. In the corner of the room, a black and while film involving much swash and buckle was chattering quietly on the TV. While Douglas Fairbanks Jr swished his sword with laughing, lethal accuracy, Grace Hobden picked up a Sabatier filleting knife from the rack in her kitchen, went into the living room and, without hesitating for a moment, plunged the blade into the soft mound of her husband’s chest.”

The Outsiders (1967)

In the world of Great Opening Lines, this is a modern classic. The narrator is 14-year-old Ponyboy Curtis, a Tulsa, Oklahoma “greaser” who is about to be attacked by members of a rival gang. Without giving away anything about the plot, The Outsiders is one of only a handful of novels in history in which the opening and closing lines are exactly the same.

The novel, which helped establish the YA (Young Adult) genre in American fiction, is now regarded as a modern classic. In 2019, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) included it on their list the 100 novels that have most “shaped our world.”

The novel was written by Susan Hinton while she was still in high school, but she was urged to publish it under the pen name S. E. Hinton to avoid the problem of female diminishment by male reviewers. She signed a book contract with Viking Press on her high school graduation day (and very shortly thereafter deposited the $1,000 advance they offered).

Ashes to Ashes (1999)

Beginning a novel with a cliché is generally not advised, but it works in this case, sending a clear message—this is a book about a killer and how that killer was formed. The narrator continued with a reflection that further engaged the reader:

“And sometimes the origin of desire for homicide is lost in the tangle of roots that make for an ugly childhood and a dangerous youth, so that no one may ever know if the urge was inbred or induced.”

Practical Magic [Book 1 of The Practical Magic series] (1995)

This is the first sentence of an opening paragraph that extends a warm, almost irresistible, invitation to read on:

“If a damp spring arrived, if cows in the pasture gave milk that was runny with blood, if a colt died of colic or a baby was born with a red birthmark stamped onto his cheek, everyone believed that fate must have been twisted, at least a little, by those women over on Magnolia Street. It didn’t matter what the problem was—lightning, or locusts, or a death by drowning. It didn’t matter if the situation could be explained by logic, of science, or plain bad luck. As soon as there was a hint of trouble or the slightest misfortune, people began pointing their fingers and placing blame.”

The Book of Magic [Book 3 of The Practical Magic series] (2021)

In a New York Times review, Joanne Ramos wrote: “So opens The Book of Magic, the final installment of Alice Hoffman’s popular Practical Magic series, a page-turning fairy tale of a saga that spans three books, one star-studded movie adaptation and multiple centuries of adventure and misadventure, love lost and found and bottomless cauldrons of sorcery in the lives of the bewitchingly witchy Owens family.”

The opening line warmed my heart, and I believe it will be similarly experienced by friends of libraries everywhere. In the novel’s opening paragraph, the narrator continued: “It was there that Jet Owens saw her fate in a mirror behind the reference desk. Even in her eighties, Jet was still beautiful. Each day she washed with the black soap the family prepared in March during the dark phase of the moon, with every bar then wrapped in crinkly cellophane. Jet had no aches or pains and had never been ill a day in her life, but fate is fate and it can often be what you least expect it to be. On this day, when the daffodils had begun to bloom, Jet saw that she had seven days to live.”

Murder Your Employer: The McMasters Guide to Homicide (2023)

Many novels begin with a captivating juxtaposition of antithetical elements—and in this opening sentence we see the horrific crime of murder linked with the low-key normalcy of a study-guide phrase like, “So you’ve decided to learn woodworking.” Things only get better as we continue reading:

“Congratulations. Simply by purchasing this volume, you’ve already taken the all-important first step toward a successful homicide of which you can be proud, one that would gain you the admiration of your peers, were they ever to learn of it.

“This book will see to it that they don’t.”

About the book, writer Alafair Burke (Find Me and other works) wrote: “With dry humor and an eye for hidden clues, Rupert Holmes imagines a secret school that teaches the fine art of pulling off the perfect (and perfectly deserved) murder. An utterly creative and deliciously diabolical read.”

I was delighted to include Holmes’s opening sentence in my end-of-year Smerconish.com post on “23 of the Best Opening Lines of 2023” (you can see the list here).

An Italian Wife (2014)

Reading these opening words, I found myself wondering how many family members over the centuries have heard this exact phrase as they saw husbands and other family members leaving home for a new life in America. In the novel, the narrator adds a new twist by adding:

“She didn’t know him, this husband of hers. Their marriage had been arranged by their parents long ago, before Josephine had breasts or menstruated for the first time.”

Verity (2018)

Yes, the first sentence is gory and gruesome, but it’s hard to imagine a more arresting first sentence—or a more dramatic way for Hoover to begin her dark, psychological thriller. In a 2022 Collider.com post, Hazel Khatter included this opener in her list of “10 Great Books That Hooked Readers From the Very First Line.”

The opening words come from Lowen Ashleigh, a struggling New York writer who is in standing on a crowded Manhattan sidewalk when a man just in front of her prematurely steps into the street and is struck by an oncoming truck. She lunged forward to stop him, but found herself “grasping at nothing” just before the collision. The cringeworthy tone of the first sentence continues as Lowen added, “I closed my eyes before his head went under the tire, but I heard it pop like the cork of a champagne bottle.”

The grisly opening scene has nothing to do with the plot of the rest of the novel, but it sets the stage—and the tone—for a novel that, according to a New York Post review, “Seamlessly blends romance and horror.”

High Fidelity (1995)

One wouldn’t expect a list of anything to be a good way to begin a book, but when the list is preceded by the phrase “most memorable split-ups,” it immediately gets readers to reflect on their own romantic histories—and thereby becomes particularly enticing.

The opening words come from a 35-year-old London music junkie and record-store owner who is known only by his first name, Rob. He has just been dumped by his girlfriend, Laura. As soon as Rob “hooks” readers with his opening words, he reels them in as he continues in the second paragraph:

“These were the ones that really hurt. Can you see your name in that lot, Laura? I reckon you’d sneak into the top ten, but there’s no place for you in the top five; those places are reserved for the kind of humiliations and heartbreaks that you’re just not capable of delivering. That probably sounds crueler than it is meant to, but the fact is that we’re too old to make each other miserable, and that’s a good thing, not a bad thing, so don’t take your failure to make the list personally. Those days are gone, and good fucking riddance to them; unhappiness really meant something back then. Now it’s just a drag, like a cold or having no money. If you really wanted to mess me up, you should have got to me earlier.”

All in all, this is a brilliant opening. If you haven’t yet read Hornby’s spectacular debut novel, please try to rectify the error soon. In a New York Times review, Mark Jolly described the protagonist as “a fictional figure of Prufrockian pathos” and wrote the following about the novel: “Mr. Hornby captures the loneliness and childishness of adult life with such precision and wit that you’ll find yourself nodding and smiling. High Fidelity fills you with the same sensation that you get from hearing a debut record album that has more charm and verve and depth than anything you can recall.”

Juliet, Naked (2009)

The narrator is describing an American trip taken by Annie and Duncan, a British couple on what can only be described as an unusual shopping trip to America.

The first paragraph continued: “The simple truth of this only struck Annie when they were actually inside it: apart from the graffiti on the walls, some of which made some kind of reference to the toilet’s importance in musical history, it was dank, dark, smelly and entirely unremarkable. Americans were very good at making the most of their heritage, but there wasn’t much even they could do here.”

Funny Girl (2014)

The opening line introduces readers to Barbara Parker, who is about to win the Miss Blackpool beauty pageant in northern England.

Just Like You (2020)

The opening words not only raise important questions about the nature of hatred, they pave the way for an introduction to a protagonist who is known only by her first name, Lucy. She is an unhappy, soon-to-be divorced, 42-year-old schoolteacher with two school-age boys. In the opening paragraph, the narrator continued about her:

“She hated teaching Agatha Christie for A level, she hated any conservative education secretary, she hated listening to her younger son’s trumpet practice, she hated any kind of liver, the sight of blood, reality T.V. shows, grime music, and the usual abstractions—global poverty, war, pandemics, the imminent death of the planet, and so on.”

The Kite Runner (2003)

The opening words come from a 38-year-old Afghan-American novelist we know only by his first name: Amir. Now a successful writer, he is reflecting on his life as a boy growing up in Afghanistan prior to the Soviet invasion in 1979. In the opening paragraph, he continued:

“That was a long time ago, but it’s wrong what they say about the past, I’ve learned, about how you can bury it. Because the past claws its way out. Looking back now, I realize I have been peeking unto that deserted alley for the last twenty-six years.”

The Kite Runner was the debut novel of Dr. Khaled Hosseini, a 38-year-old California physician. Born in Kabul, Afghanistan in 1965, he was the eldest of five children born to the wife of an Afghan diplomat. The entire family moved to America in 1980 after his father was granted political asylum. In 1999, Hosseini was six years into his medical practice when he learned that the Taliban had banned kite-flying in Afghanistan. Appalled by the decision to ban an activity he loved so much as a child, he quickly penned a 25-page short story about the improbable friendship that develops between two kite-loving Afghan boys—one from a privileged family, the other the son of his father’s servant. When the short story was rejected by Esquire and The New Yorker, Hosseini filed the manuscript away, figuring his writing career was over.

Two years later, in 2001, a friend read the short story and urged Hosseini to turn it into a novel. The rest, as they say, is history. When the book was published in hardcover in 2003, Hosseini took a year-long sabbatical to promote the book. After a slow start, it became a darling of book clubs all across America and ultimately spent 101 weeks on The New York Times Best Seller list. In 2007, the novel was adapted into an Oscar-nominated film. In 2007, it was adapted to the stage, and in 2011 into a popular graphic novel.

The Wrong Kind of Blood (2006)

Some opening lines gently extend a hand to readers and say, “Come, join me.” Others, like this one, grab readers by the collar and exclaim, “C’mon, were off for a ride!” The narrator and protagonist is Ed Loy, a Los Angeles private detective who has recently returned to Dublin to attend his mother’s funeral.

As soon as the ride begins, though, it takes a quick and unexpected turn, as Loy continues: “Now she was lying dead on her living room floor, and the howl of a police siren echoed through the surrounding hills. Linda had been strangled; a froth of blood brimmed from her mouth, and her bloodshot eyes bulged.”

In a 2021 blog post, writer Greg Levin included Hughes’s opener in a post on “25 of the Best Opening Lines in Crime Fiction.” About his selections, Levin wrote: “Few things enthrall me more than cracking (or clicking) open a novel and reading a first line that catapults me into Chapter 1. A line that reminds me why I read, why I write, what it means to be alive. A line that gives me whiplash. A line that makes me forget to feed my pets for the next few hours.”

Les Misérables (1862; Norman Denny translation)

The first paragraph of Hugo’s classic novel isn’t exactly a bell-ringer, but the second paragraph clearly reflected Hugo’s belief that readers always perked up when they were provided with rumor and gossip. The narrator continued:

“Although it has no direct bearing on the tale we have to tell, we must nevertheless give some account of the rumors and gossip concerning him which were in circulation when he came to occupy the diocese.”

The Revolt of Mamie Stover (1951)

Few protagonists in literary history have been introduced as effectively, or as memorably. The narrator continued: “She made a fortune. The war wasn’t a disaster for her; it was an opportunity. It multiplied the demand for her merchandise. It brought her long lines of eager new customers.”

Huie’s novel was a blockbuster, selling over three million copies in paperback alone When 20th Century Fox acquired film rights in 1955, they intended it as a vehicle for Monroe, but they were never able to finalize a deal. Jane Russell ultimately starred in the 1956 film adaptation, and her performance was widely praised, even by critics who panned the film as a highly sanitized version of the original novel.

Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)

In a 2011 DailyWritingTips.com post on “20 Great Opening Lines to Inspire the Start of Your Story,“ Mark Nichol wrote about this legendary first sentence: “Every once in a while there comes an opening line that seems to have an entire story folded up inside it. But it’s just the label on the envelope. And I challenge you to withstand the urge to open it up and read the message.“

In 2005, Time magazine included Their Eyes Were Watching God on its list of the 100 best English-language novels since 1923. The opening line served as a springboard to two paragraphs that capture a familiar theme in gender dynamics—men and women pursue their dreams in very different ways:

“Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men.

“Now, women forget all those things they don’t want to remember and remember everything they don’t want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.”

In a 2020 ThoughtCo.com article, writer Julia Pearson nicely summarized the meaning of the opening paragraphs: “The metaphor of ‘ships at a distance’ describes how reality is shaped differently for men and women. Men view their dreams far away, and few are able to fulfill them (only ‘some’ who are lucky to have them ‘come in with the tide’). Women, on the other hand, don’t think of dreams as far-away vessels they will never set foot on. For women, ‘the dream is the truth.’”

Island of the Aunts (originally published in England under the title Monster Mission) (1999)

This is yet another example of a novel for children treating a serious crime in a sensible or almost commendable way. In the novel, the narrator continued: “Aunt Etta and Aunt Coral and Aunt Myrtle were not natural kidnappers. For one thing, they were getting old, and kidnapping is hard work; for another, though they looked a little odd, they were very caring people.” The novel was named a School Library Journal Best Book of 2000.

Malice Aforethought (1931)

In The Life of a Provincial Lady (1988), a biography of the English mystery writer E. M. Delafield, Violet Powell hailed this opener as an “immortal sentence.” I concur.

Iles is not especially well remembered by modern readers, but he was very popular in the 1920s and 30s (he also wrote under the pen names Anthony Berkeley and A. Monmouth Platts). Malice Aforethought is an early example of what is known as an “inverted detective story,“ a mystery novel in which the crime and the perpetrator of the crime are revealed at the beginning of the tale—and the rest of the story is centered around the solution.

The Quiet Game [Book 1 of the Penn Cage series] (1999)

This is a heart-tugging beginning, and every reader who’s ever lost a loved one will likely feel an immediate connection with the narrator, a former Houston prosecutor and bestselling writer named Penn Cage. Cage went on to be featured in six additional Iles mystery stories. A seventh is in-the-works.

Dead Sleep [Book 3 of Mississippi series] (2001)

A review in People magazine called this “A stunning opening to a complex thriller.” A perfect example of what writers commonly call a “hook,” the first sentence immediately grabs our attention and yanks us into the story. It is only after continuing to read, however, that we realize the narrator—a female photojournalist named Jordan Glass—doesn’t mean shooting in the traditional way. She continued:

“People were always my gift, but they were wearing me down long before I won the prize. Still, I kept shooting them, in some blind quest that I didn’t even know I was on. It’s hard to admit that, but the Pulitzer was a different milestone for me than it is for most photographers. You see, my father won it twice.”

The World According to Garp (1978)

The narrator continued: “In the movie theater she had to move three times, but each time the soldier moved closer to her until she was sitting against the musty wall, her view of the newsreel almost blocked by some silly colonnade, and she resolved she would not get up and move again. The soldier moved once more and sat beside her.”

The novel begins with a description of a feisty woman standing up to a rape attempt. In an Introduction to a 40th anniversary edition of the book in 2018, Irving wrote: “The World According to Garp was always a feminist novel, but in the passage of time I’ve become more of a feminist. Why? Because the inequalities and discrimination women faced in the start-up days of the women’s movement haven’t gone away…. Garp is a political novel, and the politics of sexual intolerance and suppression haven’t gone away.” The novel was Irving’s first bestseller, and the first to be translated into other languages. It went on to win the 1980 National Book Award for Paperback General Fiction.

A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989)

These powerful opening words come from narrator John Wheelwright, who, along with his best friend Owen Meany, grew up in a small New Hampshire town in the 1950s. John described Owen as remarkable young man who saw himself as God’s instrument on earth, and as fulfilling a role that had been prophesied for him. The novel is generally regarded as an homage to Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum. Grass, along with Charles Dickens, was an enormous influence on the adolescent Irving, and it can hardly be a coincidence that Owen Meany has the same initials as The Tin Drum’s protagonist, Oskar Matzerath. In a 2007 New York Times article (“A Soldier Once”), Irving formally acknowledged that the Meany book was written in “homage” to Grass.

In a 2019 Book Chase blog post, reviewer Sam Sattler identified his three favorite opening paragraphs, this one from Owen Meany, another from Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove, and a third from Peter Dexter’s Spooner. About them, he wrote: “A good first paragraph is one of the most important tools an author has available to grab my book-browsing attention—usually quickly and in less than 100 words. I can learn more about the style and readability of an author from an opening paragraph than I will ever gather from a canned dust jacket summary or some blurb from a fellow author of the writer’s that I wouldn’t believe in a million years anyway.”

Last Night in Twisted River (2009)

From the very first sentenced, the reader is thrust into a dramatic and dangerous scene. The technical term for this is in media res (Latin for “into the middle of things”), and Irving demonstrates great skill at employing the device.

In the first paragraph, the narrator continued: “One of the loggers had reached for the youth’s long hair—the older man’s fingers groped around in the frigid water, which was thick, almost soupy with the sloughed-off slabs of bark. Then two logs collided hard on the would-be rescuer’s arm, breaking his wrist. The carpet of moving logs had completely closed over the young Canadian, who never surfaced; not even a hand or one of his boots broke out of the brown water.”

In One Person (2012)

The narrator and protagonist, a bisexual novelist named Billy Abbott, continued: “We are formed by what we desire. In less than a minute of excited, secretive longing, I desired to become a writer and to have sex with Miss Frost—not necessarily in that order.”

A Pale View of the Hills (1982)

The opening words come from Etsuko, a middle-aged Japanese woman who, after the end of her marriage to a British man, is now living alone in England. This was Ishiguro’s debut novel, and it launched a spectacular literary career that would ultimately win the author the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature.

The Remains of the Day (1989)

The opening words of this 1989 Man Booker Prize-winning novel come from an English butler known only as Stevens. After spending a lifetime in service at Darlington Hall, he is now employed by Mr. Farraday, a wealthy American who purchased the estate after Lord Darlington’s death. When his new employer plans to make a five-week trip back to America, he urges Stevens to take a well-earned vacation on his own, and he sweetens the proposal by offering him the use of his personal car and agreeing to pay for the gas.

Stevens is initially hesitant, but the idea gradually takes hold in his mind—especially when he realizes it may allow him to follow up on a letter he has recently received from Miss Kenton, a housekeeper he had feelings for when they worked together many years ago. The rest of the story—including numerous flashbacks that prompt a sobering reevaluation of his entire life—was memorably brought to the big screen in the acclaimed 1993 film adaptation, starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson.

Klara and the Sun (2021)

An opening sentence often provides important clues about what is about to unfold, and such is the case with Klara and the Sun, the first novel to come from Ishiguro since he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2017.

Since most people would say when we were young, and not when we were new, it comes as no surprise to learn that the narrator and her friends are non-human (given the designation AF—for Artificial Friends—they are robots designed to be friends to their owners). Since AFs depend on sunlight to recharge their batteries, Klara and Rosa’s position near the window becomes vitally important. The entire novel is a compelling allegory about loneliness and the deep need to make a connection in life.

The Lost Weekend (1944)

Short, pithy first sentences, often called hooks, don’t have a monopoly on Great Opening Lines—and the shortest ones are simply unable to establish an atmosphere or develop characterization, as this beginning paragraph does so masterfully.

The novel begins with Don Birnam, a 33-year-old Manhattan writer with a drinking problem, reading and reflecting on a passage from a book he is reading. The narrator continued about Birnam:

“Already he knew the sentence by heart: he might have written it himself. Indeed, it was with a sense of familiarity, of recognition, that his mind had first read through and accepted that sentence only a moment before; and now, as he relaxed his fingers’ grip and dropped the book to the floor, he said aloud to himself: ’That’s me, all right.’“

Jackson, a recovering alcoholic, was writing his debut novel, and he was clearly writing from hard-earned experience. The book was hailed from the outset, with Sinclair Lewis writing that it was “the only unflinching story of an alcoholic that I have ever read.“ It was quickly adapted into an acclaimed 1945 film, directed by Billy Wilder and starring Ray Milland (it won four Oscars: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, and Best Adapted Screenplay).

A Second-Hand Life (1967)

When I shared this opening line with my dear friend Linda Strydom, she was blown away by the beauty of the passage, writing:

“Now HOW would someone think of writing that she had sat in the last of the lawn chairs that had not yet been put away for the winter? And the image of the corduroy suit was so visual and tactile that I could almost feel the nap of it against the underside of my left pinkie. The author didn’t simply craft these sentences. He was there. He saw what was happening. For me, the exquisite phrasing was “the hook.“ The intended hook (the death notice held in her lap) was secondary, almost immaterial.

The Haunting of Hill House (1959)

The narrator continued: “Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.“

In a 2003 Preface to a new edition of Jackson’s novel, Stephen King wrote glowingly about this opening: “I think there are few if any descriptive passages in the English language that are finer than this; it is the sort of quiet epiphany every writer hopes for: words that somehow transcend words, words which add up to a total greater than the sum of the parts.“

In a 2023 Guardian article, Irish writer Liz Nugent included this opener in her list of “Top 10 First Lines in Fiction.” About it, she wrote: “Immediately, we are drawn into a universe of uncertainty with this immaculate line. Here, for all living creatures, reality can overwhelm and therefore the suggestion of a dream world is a viable alternative. But as we all know, dreams can turn to nightmares and even the hint of what an insect might dream about sends shivers down the spine.“

We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962)

In a 2017 Literary Hub post, Emily Temple hailed this as “The Best Opening Paragraph of All Time,“ and her assessment is easy to understand. I love the entire first paragraph, but the killer sentence is the final one. Did the family members all die as a result of mushroom poisoning? And did they all die at the hand of Merricat, as the narrator and protagonist wishes to be called?

In her post, Temple continued: “This paragraph is brilliant because of Merricat’s voice, and so is the rest of the book. It immediately teaches us who she is, and what this book is going to be like.“ Michael Douglas’s production company adapted the novel into an acceptable 2019 film, but one that didn’t do justice to the novel.

The Other Woman (1972)

The Portrait of a Lady (1880)

In an article in Jay Parini’s The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature (2004), James scholar Melissa Knox wrote: “The novel’s first two sentences are among the most famous first sentences...in Western literature.“ She went on to add:

“The ambivalence, hesitance, quiet formality of these lines exemplify James’s own life as well as characterizing the novel of manners. The ’ceremony known as afternoon tea’ may be taken broadly as a metaphor for life and how it is lived, or whether to live it at all, as the second sentence implies: whether you drink the tea or not, and it is clear that many people never do, ’the situation’ remains ’delightful’.“

Cover Her Face (1962)

This was James’s debut novel, published when she was forty-two-years old. The book served as an introduction to Chief-Inspector Adam Dalgleish, a Scotland Yard detective, but he doesn’t show up until the fourth chapter, nearly fifty pages into the book. In the remaining thirteen books in the series, he makes far earlier appearances.

The opening paragraph is not particularly dramatic, but it is beautifully crafted. A murder occurred some years ago, followed by a sensational trial that has now faded from memory (and captured so perfectly by the inspired phrasing “the headlines were yellowing on the newspaper lining of cupboard drawers”). The seeds of the murder were sowed at a dinner party exactly three months before the crime, and we are immediately left wondering what transpired on the evening in question.

Original Sin (1994)

From the outset, we know this will be no ordinary crime/mystery novel, and we’re anxious to learn more about this “temporary shorthand typist.“

A Certain Justice (1997)

It’s direct, dramatic, and almost dazzling in its simplicity—in other words, an almost perfect opening sentence. As the narrator continued, things only got better: “This is one death which, however terrible that last second of appalled realization, comes mercifully unburdened with anticipatory terror.“

In a 1997 Harvard Crimson review, Soman S. Chainani singled out the opening line for special tribute and wrote about the entire book: “A Certain Justice is most enjoyable because of its deliciously subversive literary flair. James’ prose is eloquent and yet strikingly lucid.“

A Richer Dust [Book 3 in the Triumph of Time series] (1931)

This is a spectacular metaphorical observation—and a fabulous opening line—from a female writer who was well known and widely praised in her era (she was so familiar to English readers that publishers selected her to write the Introduction to the 1952 British edition of The Diary of Anne Frank). Sadly, she has been largely forgotten by modern readers.

If Jameson’s opening line is stirring a thought in you—but you’re not sure why— it’s probably because you’re thinking about a similar but even more famous metaphorical opening line: “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” This was the first sentence of L. P. Hartley’s 1953 novel The Go-Between, and many regard it as one of the greatest opening lines in literary history. Even though I have no evidence to support my speculation, I’ve always suspected that Hartley might have been inspired by Jameson’s earlier opening line.

Code Name Sapphire (2023)

The novel’s opening words are quite literally filled with intrigue, and they have a film-noirish quality that is easy to visualize in the movie theaters of our minds. As the scene unfolds, we quickly learn that the man in question is an American soldier, and when the mysterious woman whispers in his ear “If you hope to live, follow me!” we eagerly go along for the ride.

Writer Patti Callahan (The Secret Book of Flora Lea) wrote about the book: “From the opening scene to the final page, Code Name Sapphire will not let you go.”

Waiting (1999)

In a 1999 New York Times book review (titled “The Eighteen-Year Itch”), Francine Prose wrote: “Waiting has the sort of first sentence...that commands us to read the second, which makes us read the third, and so on until we’re too caught up in the novel to marvel that its plot—the story of a couple waiting chastely and more or less patiently for 18 years until they can get married—should seem so suspenseful.“ The novel won the 1999 National Book Award for Fiction.

In a 2013 blog post, writer Colin Falconer ranked Ha Jin’s first sentence Number 9 on his list of “The Best 43 Opening Lines in Novel Writing History.“ About it, he quipped: “Every year?“

And in a 2023 Guardian article, Irish writer Liz Nugent included the opening words in her list of “The Top Ten First Lines in Fiction,” writing: “This line gives us a peek into a society where divorce is clearly not as straightforward as it is in western cultures. The reader is forced to wonder why Lin has to return to this village, where he’s returning from, why he wants to divorce his wife and how long this has been going on. We get the sense that our protagonist is tired of the annual pilgrimage and yet, he is relentless. He needs this release. We know immediately that the book is well named.“

Middle Passage (1990)

The year is 1830 and the narrator is Rutherford Calhoun, a freed slave from Illinois who moved to New Orleans a year earlier. As the story begins, Calhoun is attempting to flee the city by stowing away on a ship.

He continued: “In my case, it was a spirited Boston schoolteacher named Bailey who led me to become a cook aboard the Republic. Both Isadora and my creditors, I should add, who entered into a conspiracy, a trap, a scheme so cunning that my only choices were prison...or marriage, which was, for a man of my temperament, worse than imprisonment--especially if you knew Isadora.“

The Cold Dish (2004)

With these words, the literary world was introduced to Walt Longmire, the sheriff of Wyoming’s fictional Absaroka County. A prototypical Western lawman, Walt is ruggedly handsome, laconic, and prone to thoughtful introspection as he surveys the beautiful natural world that surrounds him. Like so many of the iconic fictional lawmen who’ve preceded him in the genre, he also has a powerful sense of duty and honor, and a deep and abiding commitment to seeing that justice is done. He has thus far appeared in eighteen novels and eighteen short stories.

In 2012, Johnson’s Longmire novels were adapted by Warner Horizon into “Longmire,” a television series on the A&E Network (for a time, it was the highest-rated original crime drama series on the network). With Australian actor Robert Taylor in the starring role, and a strong supporting cast, the series continued for six seasons, the first three on A&E and final three on Netflix.

The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared (2009)

The entirety of Chapter One is composed of these four paragraphs, and there are few better openings to a comic novel, or any novel, for that matter. Once Karlsson makes his escape, he becomes a Forrest Gump-like figure who shares the stage with some of the 20th century’s most famous figures. He also participates in some of the century’s most explosive events—and, since Karlsson was a former munitions expert, I mean that literally.

The book became an immediate bestseller in Sweden, but Jonasson struggled to find a publisher for an English-language version. It was finally picked up by Hesperus Press, a tiny English publisher (only five employees), and went on to become an international bestseller, with more than 10 million copies sold. A film version, starring Will Ferrell, is in production.

Stillicide: A Novel (2020)

In one sentence, we’re completely hooked. Quickly transported to the opening scene, we see a young, gravely injured boy, lying on the ground just in front of us, his life slowly slipping away. The narrator continues with grisly, but gripping details:

“With the thick rain the blood from the wound ran a thin washed pink.

“Nearby again a pheasant crowed, a klaxon call as they make before thunder.

“The bullet had gone in at the boy’s jaw and removed that side.”

The Thornthwaite Inheritance (2010)

Only in the opening lines of children’s literature do we find murder portrayed so matter-of-factly, or discussed in such a diabolically delicious manner. In the opening paragraph, the narrator went on to add:

“Was it Lorelli’s cunning scheme to put on a play about the French Revolution, casting Ovid in the role of an aristocrat to be executed using a working guillotine? Or could it have been that long hot summer when Ovid managed to produce an ice lolly containing a small but deadly explosive, triggered by the surrounding ice reaching melting point.”

In response to a query from me, Jones said that he considered the novel’s first sentence “one of my stronger opening lines.“ He went on to add, “I often describe the opening line as a key that unlocks the story and advise young readers to re-read it once they know what happens and see how the essence of the story is contained in that one sentence.“

Constable & Toop (2013)

Fear of Flying (1973)

The narrator is 29-year-old Isadora Wing, a Manhattan poet and journalist. On a flight to Vienna to attend a psychoanalytic conference, she is seated next to her husband Bennett, the psychoanalyst she married. She continues: “God knows it was a tribute either to the shrinks’ ineptitude or my own glorious unanalyzability that I was now, if anything more scared of flying than when I began my analytic adventures some thirteen years earlier.“

How to Save Your Own Life (1977)

Parachutes and Kisses (1984)

Inventing Memory: A Novel of Mothers and Daughters (1997)

The narrator, Sara Solomon, continued: “And then he tells me something about some man in my life, or some business deal—and always it turns out that he is right, though I never quite remember his words when I awake. He speaks in that dream language of the dead.“

Fear of Dying (2015)

The narrator and protagonist is Vanessa Wonderman, a sixty-something former actress. She continued: “Walking down the street, my mandolin-shaped ass swaying and swinging to their backward eyes. How strange that I only completely knew this power when it was gone—or transferred to my daughter, all male eyes on her nubile twentyish body, promising babies. I missed this power.“

Ulysses (1922)

I was never all that impressed with this opener, but the folks at the American Book Review ranked it number 21 in their 2006 listing of the “100 Best First Lines from Novels.“ In a 2012 Guardian article, English wordsmith Robert McCrum included it in his compilation of “The Ten Best First Lines in Fiction.” About it, he wrote: “This is the classic third-person opening to the 20th-century novel that has shaped modern fiction, pro and anti, for almost a hundred years.”

One of literary history’s most influential novels, Ulysses was an epic “stream-of-consciousness” novel that had famous supporters and dissenters. T. S. Eliot said it was “the most important expression which the present age has found.” Vladimir Nabokov hailed it as a “divine work of art.” And Virginia Woolf wrote about it: “Ulysses was a memorable catastrophe—immense in daring, terrific in disaster.”

Dancing With Eva (2006)

Edith Mecklenburg, now in the final years of her life, was Eva Braun’s personal secretary during WWII. After the war, she created a new life for herself in England, but a recent letter from someone in her past has disquieted her.

The narrator continued: “Then she could have tried to forget it, since he surely would not have written again. If you don’t hear from someone for half a century, then suddenly you do, you can assume he’s probably not going to pester you for a reply.“

The Metamorphosis (1915)

This line, with its fantastical and highly unexpected ending, has excited readers for more than a century. When the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Gabriel García Márquez first read the line as an undergraduate at the National University of Colombia in the late 1940s, the effect was immediate and dramatic. “The first line almost knocked me off the bed. I was so surprised,” he later recalled in a 1981 Paris Review interview. Márquez went on to add: “When I read the line I thought to myself that I didn’t know anyone was allowed to write things like that. If I had known, I would have started writing a long time ago. So I immediately started writing short stories.”

One of the most famous first lines in all of literature, it was originally written in German this way: “Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte, fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheueren Ungeziefer verwandelt.” Since “Ungeheuren Ungeziefer” has no literal equivalent in English, it has been translated in a variety of different ways for English readers. In a 2015 Guardian article, writer W. B. Gooderham provided an invaluable service by compiling a variety of divergent translations. The version above, the most popular, comes from a 1933 translation by Edwin and Willa Muir. Here are the others:

“When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.” [Stanley Corngold, 1972)

“One morning, upon awakening from agitated dreams, Gregor Samsa found himself, in his bed, transformed into a monstrous vermin.” [Joachim Neugroschel, 1993]

“When Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from troubled dreams, he found himself changed into a monstrous cockroach in his bed.” [Michael Hofmann, 2007]

“As Gregor Samsa woke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed into some kind of monstrous vermin.” [Joyce Crick, 2009]

“One morning, as Gregor Samsa woke from a fitful, dream-filled sleep, he found that he had changed into an enormous bedbug.” [Christopher Moncrieff]

“When Gregor Samsa woke one morning from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed right there in his bed into some sort of monstrous insect.” [Susan Bernofsky, 2014]

“One morning Gregor Samsa woke in his bed from uneasy dreams and found he had turned into a large verminous insect” [John R. Williams, 2014]

The Trial (1925)

In a 2013 interview, Stephen King had an off-the-cuff idea he shared with The Atlantic’s Joe Fassler: “You could go around and ask people about their favorite first lines. I think you’ll find that most of them, right away, establish the sense of voice we talked about. Why not do it? I’d love to know, like, Jonathan Franzen’s favorite first line.” Fassler jumped on the idea and immediately reached out to nearly two dozen of his favorite writers, including Franzen.

As it turns out, Franzen’s favorite opening line was from The Trial, and here’s what he had to say about it: “The method of the whole novel is here in a nutshell. You think you’re being introduced to the persecution of an innocent man, but if you read the chapter that follows carefully, you see that Josef K. is in fact doing all sorts of bad things in his life. If you then go back and reread the first sentence, it becomes significant that the very first impulse of the narrator (who is aligned with Josef K.’s point of view) is to blame somebody else.”

Amerika (1927)

Kafka began work on this story in 1912, just after finishing "Metamorphosis." After giving it a working title of Der Verschollene ("The Missing Person" or "The Man Who Disappeared"), he worked on the project in a desultory way for the next dozen years. It remained unfinished at his death in 1924.

In his will, Kafka left everything to Max Brod, his literary editor, close friend, and executor of his estate. Kafka wanted all of his unfinished literary works to be destroyed, but Brod used Kafka's raw notes to finish the tale. Brod changed the title to Amerika when it was first published in Germany in 1927, and he insisted on retaining the German title when an English language translation appeared in 1928.

The Betrayal of Natalie Hargrove (2009)

In her debut YA novel, Kate plays off the classic once upon a time opener to introduce Natalie Hargrove, a Charleston, South Carolina high school senior with a saucy attitude (it’s not as in-your-face as Holden Caulfield’s, but it’s there nonetheless, and Natalie doesn’t hesitate to display it in her interactions with schoolmates). The first two paragraphs also achieve an important goal of great opening lines: giving a voice to the protagonist. In the third paragraph, Natalie continued:

“Back then, your biggest worries were not getting caught stealing that pack of Juicy Fruit from the drugstore…oh, and making it out of elementary school with some semblance of a soul.”

Kate went on to achieve international fame for her bestselling Fallen series, but The Betrayal of Natalie Hargrove was the work that started it all. If, a few chapters into it, you sense something vaguely familiar about the story, it turns out to be the author’s reworking of the Macbeth tale.

Up the Down Staircase (1964)

So begins a novel about Sylvia Barrett, an idealistic young college grad who has accepted a job as an English teacher at an inner-city high school. Published when the author was fifty-three years old, the book was based on Kaufman’s own first-year teaching experiences.

One of the first novels to respectfully capture the vernacular of urban youth, the book became a surprise hit (on The New York Times Best-Seller list for 64 weeks). Adapted into a popular 1967 film (starring Sandy Dennis), a stage version of the novel is still frequently performed in high school drama productions, and has become something of an American classic.

Love, etc. (1979)

After this nifty oxymoronic opening—with the captivating idea of a happily miserable couple whose marriage is not unlike a Chinese finger puzzle—only the nearly comatose would fail to read on.

Zorba the Greek (1946)

These opening words--from the Prologue to the book--come from a 2014 English translation by Peter Bien, who worked from the original Greek edition of the book. Bien regarded the original 1952 translation as inadequate because the translator, Carl Wildman, spoke no Greek and relied on a French translation of Kazantzakis's original work. The original Wildman rendition began in a less dramatic, and almost bland way: "I first met him in Piraeus. I wanted to take the boat for Crete and had gone down to the port. It was almost daybreak and raining."

In the Bien translation, the dramatic opening words come from the novel's unnamed narrator, a young, bookish intellectual whose life was transformed by a Greek working-class man with an infectious passion for life. He continued: "The great benefactors in my life have been journeys and dreams. Very few people, dead or alive, have helped me in my struggles; yet if I wished to single out those individual souls who did engrave their traces most deeply upon my soul, I would presumably designate these four: Homer, Bergson, Nietzsche, and Zorba."

Report to Greco (1961)

These opening words from the book's Prologue are so intriguing that we're drawn in for a taste of more. And we're not disappointed, for when we finally get to Chapter One, it begins: "I look down into myself and shudder. On my father's side my ancestors were bloodthirsty pirates on water, warrior chieftains on land, fearing neither God nor man; on my mother's side, drab, goodly peasants who bowed trustfully over the soil the entire day, sowed, waited with confidence for rain and sun, reaped, and in the evening seated themselves on the stone bench in front of their homes, folded their arms, and placed their hopes in God. Fire and soil. How could I harmonize these two militant ancestors inside me."

Jack’s Magic Beans (2011)

Keene is the author of more than forty books, primarily in the horror, crime, and dark fantasy genres (as much as anyone, he is responsible for the world’s current fascination with zombies). In 2019, when asked by a Goodreads user to identify his favorite opening line, he identified this one.

The Complex (2016)

In 2019, Keene identified this as his second favorite opening line, and it’s easy to understand why. For his favorite, see the other Keene entry.

Pontoon: A Novel of Lake Wobegon (2007)

For decades, Keillor infused his Prairie Home Companion broadcasts with his wry wit, and it seems only natural—and fitting—that he would also bring it to the opening sentence of the second novel in his Lake Wobegon series.

Guy Noir and the Straight Skinny (2012)

This is a first-rate opening line, fitting perfectly into the noir tradition of American crime stories. The novel represents the first literary appearance of Guy Noir, a fictional private eye that Keillor first introduced in 1995 on his Prairie Home Companion series. In the novel’s first paragraph, the ingeniously-named detective continued:

“This has happened to me from time to time in my so-called career as a private eye in St. Paul, Minnesota, and each occurrence promoted clear thinking, inconvenient though it was at the time. Christians try to find clarity through prayer, but you don’t really know what prayer is until you meet someone who’s prepared to shoot you.”

Schindler’s Ark [published in America as Schindler’s List] (1982)

You: A Novel (2014)

In a debut novel described by Stephen King as “Hypnotic and scary,” the opening words immediately establish a suspenseful, even sinister atmosphere. A young woman who has entered a bookstore is being watched, possibly by a store employee, or maybe a customer, and almost certainly a male. As the watcher continues, things begin to move in an almost creepy direction:

“You’re so clean that you’re dirty and you murmur your first word to me—hello—when most people would just pass by, but not you, in your loose pink jeans, a pink spun from Charlotte’s Web and where did you come from?”

You is the first of four novels to feature the anti-hero Joe Goldberg, a bookstore manager who is equal parts darkly sociopathic and charmingly lovable. The first two books formed the basis for a popular Lifetime television series of the same title, with Greg Berlanti in the Jacoby role.

The Town and the City (1950)

On the Road (1957)

The opening words come from Sal Paradise, the narrator and protagonist of one of the most influential books in American cultural history. The man mentioned in the first sentence is Dean Moriarty, a thinly veiled version of Neal Cassady, a beat poet who played a major role in the real-life philosophical development of Kerouac. By the way, nearly a decade later, Cassady was prominently featured in yet another major literary work—as one of the Merry Pranksters in Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968)

Two days after On the Road was published, Gilbert Millstein wrote in a New York Times review that it was “the most beautifully executed, the clearest and the most important utterance yet made by the generation Kerouac himself named years ago as ’beat,’ and whose principal avatar he is.“ Millstein went on to compare the book to Ernest Hemingway’s most influential work, writing: “Just as, more than any other novel of the Twenties, The Sun Also Rises came to be regarded as the testament of the ’Lost Generation,’ so it seems that On the Road will come to be known as that of the ’Beat Generation.’“

Kerouac’s classic novel is now regarded as more of a cultural phenomenon than a literary work, but Millstein immediately recognized it as a work of the highest order, writing: “There are sections of On the Road in which the writing is of a beauty almost breathtaking [and] some writing on jazz that has never been equaled in American fiction, either for insight, style or technical virtuosity.“

The Dharma Bums (1958)

Satori in Paris (1966)

The Sea is My Brother (written 1943; first published 2011)

Often called "The Lost Novel," The Sea is My Brother was written by the twenty-one-year-old Kerouac in 1943, a full seven years before The Town and the City would launch his writing career in 1950, and fourteen years before he became a celebrity with On the Road. This opening paragraph suggests a talented young writer, but one who has not yet found the "voice" that would characterize his later writings.

In the second paragraph, the narrator continued: "It was dusk. The warm July streets, veiled in a mist of sultriness which obscured the sharp outlines of Broadway, swarmed with a pageant of strollers, colorful fruit stands, buses, taxis, shiny automobiles, Kosher shops, movie marquees, and all the innumerable phenomena that make up the brilliant carnival spirit of a midsummer thoroughfare in New York City."

The Other Side of Silence [Book 11 in the Bernie Gunther series] (2016)

These are dramatic opening words, and I believe they perfectly capture the reality of most people considering suicide: they don’t want to end their lives so much as they want to bring an end to the unbearable pain they’ve been experiencing. In this case, the pain-sufferer is Bernie Gunther, an aging former Berlin homicide detective with a dark past. As the novel begins, he is working under a false name as a concierge at a hotel in the French Riviera—and he is definitely not a happy camper. In his opening words, he continued:

“Elizabeth, my wife, left me a while ago and I’d been missing her a lot. That was one source of pain, and a pretty major one, I have to admit. Even after a war in which more than four million German soldiers died, German wives are hard to come by. But another serious pain in my life was the war itself, of course, and what happened to me way back then, and in the Soviet POW camps afterward.”

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962)

These first words immediately suggest paranoid ideation, and that impression is confirmed as the narrator—who we will shortly learn is a Native American psychiatric patient named “Chief” Bromden—continues:

“They’re mopping when I come out the dorm, all three of them sulking and hating everything, the time of day, the place they’re at here, the people they got to work around. When they hate like this, better if they don’t see me. I creep along the wall quiet as dust in my canvas shoes, but they got special sensitive equipment [that] detects my fear and they all look up, all three at once, eyes glittering out of the black faces like the hard glitter of radio tubes out of the back of an old radio.“

In 1975, director Milos Forman adapted Kesey’s classic novel into an equally classic film, starring Jack Nicholson as Randle McMurphy, a new patient at a mental institution. The film was nominated for nine Academy Awards, winning five, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress (to Louise Fletcher as nurse Ratched), and Best Supporting Actor (to Brad Dourif).

Sailor Song (1992)

After this nifty tribute to Charles Dickens, the narrator continued: “He was dreaming about his ex-wife Jeannie, and how good she looked in their duster days in Fresno—the clean, simple days, before the baby and the Bakatcha Movement were born. Before the decade came to be known as the Nasty Nineties.“ NOTE: Galaxxy is spelled correctly in the first sentence.

Off Season (1980)

It was openings like this that inspired Stephen King to write: “Ketchum has become a kind of hero to those of us who write tales of terror and suspense. He is, quite simply, one of the best in the business.” And about this particular novel, King wrote that Off Season was “a kind of literary Night of the Living Dead.”

Ketchum has often been dismissed as a purveyor of violent pornography, but that would be writing him off too easily. In 2011, he received the World Horror Convention’s Grand Master Award for outstanding contribution to the horror genre.

Hide and Seek (1984)

The Girl Next Door (1989)

In a 2012 LitReactor.com article (“Storyville: Endings, Twisted and Otherwise”), writer Richard Thomas wrote about opening words: “You need to set your audience up. Whether you are writing a 500-word bit of flash fiction or an epic series, you need to plant that seed…that really gives you a clue as to what is to come.” And about this opener in particular, he wrote: “That is such a great set-up. The story that follows is all about pain and boy, what a hook.”

The Box (1994)

The Lost (2001)

“Flowers for Algernon,” in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (April 1959)

Charlie is a man with an IQ of 68, and these are the opening words from his very first “Progris riport.” A few weeks earlier, he was recruited to be the first human subject in an experimental surgical procedure designed to increase intelligence (an earlier procedure on a mouse named Algernon paved the way).

Keyes’ short story was widely praised, winning the 1960 Hugo Award for Best Short Story. A few years later, he expanded it into a critically acclaimed novel (it shared the 1968 Nebula Award for Best Novel). The tale went on to become a part of popular culture when it was adapted into the 1968 film Charlie, starring Cliff Robertson.

The Secret Life of Bees (2002)

The words come from Lily Owens, a fourteen-year-old girl who, struggling under the care of an abusive single-parent father, continues to be haunted by memories of her mother, who died when she was only four.

It’s a terrific opening, but it was preceded by an even more spectacular epigraph, taken from Man and Insects, a 1965 text on beekeeping by L. Hugh Newman:

“The queen, for her part, is the unifying force of the community; if she is removed from the hive, the workers very quickly sense her absence. After a few hours, or even less, they show unmistakable signs of queenlessness.“

The Mermaid Chair (2005)

In a 2019 “Ask the Editor” post on PublishersWeekly.com, Betty Kelly Sargent, the founder and CEO of Bookworks, hailed this as one of her favorite opening lines. When asked by a reader, “Do you think it’s essential to start a novel with a dynamite first sentence?” Sargent replied:

“Absolutely. Your first sentence must entice, impress, surprise, and maybe even shock the reader. With all the competition for a reader’s attention these days, it’s important to try to hook your reader instantly, so spending the time it takes to craft a powerful opening sentence is well worth the effort…. Think of the opening sentence as an invitation to read your story—an invitation that’s hard to refuse.”

The Book of Longings (2020)

This was one of my selections for The Top Twenty Opening Lines of 2020 (to be seen here). The idea that Jesus had a wife, and that she is telling the story of their life together, is compelling. It also raises a question few have ever asked: What kind of husband would Jesus have been?

In the novel, Ana continued: “He said he heard rumblings inside me while I slept, a sound like thunder from far over the Nahal Zippori valley or even farther beyond the Jordan. I don’t doubt he heard something. All my life, longings lived inside me, rising up like nocturnes to wail and sing through the night. That my husband bent his heart to mine on our thin straw mat and listened was the kindness I most loved in him. What he heard was my life begging to be born.”

The Beekeeper’s Apprentice (1994)

With this opening line, the literary world was introduced to Mary Russell, a Jewish-American teenager who literally runs into the 54-year-old Sherlock Holmes while wandering through the Sussex Downs in the Southeast of England. The year is 1915, and Mary, whose parents died a year earlier in a motorcar accident in California, is now living with an English aunt. Holmes, now retired from his consulting detective practice, has become a beekeeper. The unlikely pair quickly become fast friends, and she soon becomes his apprentice in the grand art of detection.

The Beekeeper’s Apprentice is the first in a series of twenty delightful Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes mysteries. Stay tuned for more opening lines from the series.

The English Teacher (2005)

This recurring—and disturbing—thought occurs every morning to protagonist Vida Avery. She is a single mom who teaches English at a prestigious New England prep school, and the him is her teenage son, Peter. About the opening line, writer Lloyd Ferriss wrote in a Portland Press Herald review: “From its powerful beginning, Lily King’s The English Teacher soars.” In the novel’s second paragraph, the narrator continued:

“Not that she actually believed he was dead when he slept in on a Saturday. It was merely a leftover ritual, the weak ghost of an old fear from years ago when she awoke and waited, barely breathing, as close to prayer as she had ever got in her life, for a single sound of him: a little sigh, or the scrape of his feetie pajamas across the floor. He’d scuffle into her room still warm and puffy and half asleep, and the piercing relief of him collided with the horror of possessing such a fear and the dread of its return the next morning.”

Euphoria (2014)

The opening words are gripping—even horrifying—but they immediately capture the reader’s attention. As it turns out, the pale brown thing may not be a baby after all, but who could stop reading after such a sizzling opener?

King’s novel, inspired by a field trip that anthropologist Margaret Mead made to New Guinea in 1933, was one of the most acclaimed books of the year, winning numerous awards, including the 2014 Kirkus Prize for Fiction and the 2014 New England Book Award for Fiction. It was also named one of the 10 Best Books of 2014 by The New York Times Book Review.

Writers and Lovers: A Novel (2020)

The opening words come from Casey Peabody, a 31-year-old aspiring writer who has been double-whammied by a recent romantic breakup and the death of her mother. Now living in the Boston area, her life is at a turning point, and it is not clear what the future holds in store for her. While working on a novel she has wrestled with for the past six years, Casey is waiting tables at a Harvard Square restaurant and living—although a more accurate term might be existing—in a small, dark, moldy room attached to a garage. A deeply absorbing novel about the ages and stages of one woman’s life, a Boston Globe review said about the work: “The novel is a meditation on trying itself: to stay alive, to love, to care.”

In a 2020 review in London’s Evening Standard, Curtis Sittenfield also hailed the novel, writing: “I loved this book not just from the first chapter or the first page but from the first paragraph.” Sittenfield went on to add: “The voice is just so honest and riveting and insightful about creativity and life.“

Salem’s Lot (1975)

Great opening lines are often more like lures than hooks, and this one has been beckoning readers since the early stages of King’s career. In a 2020 essay on “Great Hookers I Have Known,“ King wrote about it: “I suppose if I had to pick a favorite opening sentence from my own work—and it still isn’t much of a hooker—it would be the opening sentence of Salem’s Lot.“

The man and the boy turn out to be the man and the girl, a father and daughter—Andy and Charlene “Charlie” McGee—who begin the novel “on the run” from government authorities.

You might also be interested in learning that, seven years earlier, in a 2013 interview, King identified yet another opening line from his works as his personal favorite. For more, see the Needful Things (1991) entry.

The Shining (1977)

This is the novel’s entire first paragraph—the protagonist’s simple but powerful assessment of a man who’s interviewing candidates for the job of off-season caretaker of a grand old hotel in the mountains of Colorado.

In the second paragraph, Torrance, an aspiring writer and recovering alcoholic, continued: “Ullman stood five-five, and when he moved, it was with the prissy speed that seems to be the exclusive domain of all small plump men. The part in his hair was exact, and his dark suit was sober but comforting. I am a man you can bring your problems to, that suit said to the paying customer. To the hired help it spoke more curtly: This had better be good, you. There was a red carnation in the lapel, perhaps so that no one on the street would mistake Stuart Ullman for the local undertaker.”

In 1980, the novel was adapted into a Stanley Kubrick film with an unforgettable performance by Jack Nicholson. When King first saw the film, he hated it, but ultimately came to respect it as a work of art. He wrote in Danse Macabre (1981); “Even when a director such as Stanley Kubrick makes such a maddening, perverse, and disappointing film as The Shining, it somehow retains a brilliance that is inarguable; it is simply there.”

Firestarter (1980)

You don’t regard this as a great opening line? Neither does Stephen King, and I’m including it here for that reason. I love King for many reasons, and one of the most important is his ability to cast a critical eye on his own creations. In a 2020 essay on great opening lines, he wrote: “I have written some extraordinarily unhookerish opening sentences. Take Firestarter. Of all my novels, it’s the one I remember as having the fastest takeoff—zero to seventy in about nine pages. But the opening sentence is about as exciting as a pair of dirty socks.“ After sharing the line, King went on to ask: “Do anything for you? Me neither.“

Cujo (1981)

Here, King immediately gets our attention by juxtaposing the four most innocuous opening words of all time—once upon a time—with three of the most firghtening: a monster came.

The Gunslinger [Book 1 of The Dark Tower series] (1982)

In a 2011 Lit Reactor article, Meredith Borders included this opener in her list of “The Ten Best Opening Lines of Novels.” About it, she wrote: “Stephen King began writing The Gunslinger when he was a sophomore in college; he has said that the opening sentence came to him as a forceful inspiration that he could not ignore. Twelve and a half years later, the novel was published.”

The inspiration for the novel was Robert Browning’s 1852 poem “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.” A few years after the novel was published, King reported, “I played with the idea of trying a long romantic novel embodying the feel, if not the exact sense, of the Browning poem.“ In her 2011 post, Borders agreed that King had accomplished what he set out to do, writing, “The words are stark and lovely, instantly giving the sense that we are in medias res of an epic adventure lasting through time out of mind.”

“The Body,” in Different Seasons (1982)

This is one of my Top Ten Favorite Opening Lines, a short, simple, and boldly straightforward declaration that perfectly captures an eternal truth about the human experience. I’ve personally experienced the phenomenon a number of times in my personal life, and I’m sure you have as well. The opening sentence also helps to explain one of the reasons we love writers so much: they help us express deep and powerful feelings that we’d have trouble articulating on our own.

In the opening paragraph, the narrator, a Maine writer named Gordon “Gordie” LaChance, continued: “They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them—words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they’re brought out. But it’s more than that, isn’t it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away.“

Fittingly, in 1982, Rob Reiner adapted the novella into one of my all-time favorite films, “Stand by Me.“ With Richard Dreyfuss providing the narration, King’s wonderful coming-of-age tale was brought to life by the young actors Wil Wheaton, River Phoenix, Corey Feldman, and Jerry O’Connell.

In a 2017 essay, Khaled Hosseini (The Kite Runner and other novels) described the opening words of “The Body” as deeply meaningful when he first read them at age twenty—an age when he said it was common for people to believe the world doesn’t get them. “This passage,” he wrote, was “an expression of how alone we are, really, the things that are most important to us, that are really vital to us, are perversely the most difficult to express.”

Years later, when Hosseini was a developing writer rather than a developing person, the words took on an added significance, something he could not appreciate at that earlier stage of life. He wrote: “This passage is one of the truest statements I’ve encountered about the nature of authorship. You write because you have an idea in your mind that feels so genuine, so important, so true. And yet, by the time this idea passes through the different filters of your mind, and into your head, and onto the page or the computer screen—it becomes distorted, and it’s been diminished. The writing you end up with is an approximation, if you’re lucky, of whatever it was you really wanted to say.”

Christine (1983)

Christine may be the first novel in literary history to feature a lover’s triangle that includes two human beings and an inanimate object. What the reader doesn’t know at the end of this inviting first sentence, however, is that Christine is an inanimate object who will soon become quite animated—and one of the most jealous lovers of all time.

Misery (1987)

These four lines—which form the entirety of the first chapter—are the first sounds heard by bestselling novelist Paul Sheldon as he slowly emerges from an unconscious state. Even readers who correctly decipher the sounds (“Number One. Your Number One Fan”) have no idea where the story is going to take them.

Misery won the 1987 Bram Stoker Award and was adapted into a popular 1990 film starring James Caan as Sheldon and Kathy Bates as Annie Wilkes, his devoted—and deranged—fan. Bates’s performance was so spectacular she received a Best Actress Oscar later that year. When King was asked in a 2013 Reddit “Ask Me Anything” session about which actor had best captured one of his characters in film adaptations of his works, he replied, “Kathy Bates was a great Annie Wilkes.”

The Dark Half (1989)