A Celebration of
Great Opening Lines
in World Literature

When We Walk By: Forgotten Humanity, Broken Systems, and the Role We Can Each Play in Ending Homelessness in America (2023

When I first read these opening words, I felt as if I’d been slapped on the side of the head. Like a new meme that had taken occupancy in my mind, the impossible-to-forget first sentence reverberated in my thoughts for days.

The words come from senior author Kevin Adler, who was thinking about his uncle Mark—a man who died at age fifty after spending over three decades struggling on and off the streets of Santa Cruz, California.

The haunting first sentence—and the rest of the book that followed—not only profoundly affected the way I viewed homeless people on the streets in my town, it inspired me to take some proactive steps I’d never taken before.

In a review of the book, Publisher’s Weekly said: “It’s a must-read for anyone interested in solving the problem of homelessness.” I was also pleased to include Adler’s first sentence in my Smerconish.com post on “23 of the Best Opening Lines of 2023” (to be seen here).

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.

Prague Winter: A Personal Story of Remembrance and War, 1937-1948 (2012; with Bill Woodward)

A common gambit in the world of great opening lines is to begin by confidently walking down a path of certitude, and then abruptly changing course with a frank admission that you were wrong. Albright does that very nicely here, introducing the greatest surprise of her life. She continued in the second paragraph:

“I had no idea that my family heritage was Jewish or that more than twenty of my relatives had died in the Holocaust. I had been brought up to believe in a history of my Czechoslovak homeland that was less tangled and more straightforward than the reality. I had much still to learn about the complex moral choices that my parents and others in their generation had been called on to make—choices that were still shaping my life and also that of the world.”

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.’”

“The Clock That Struck Thirteen,” in Di Yidishe Folksbibliotek [The Jewish People’s Library] (1900)

Almost a half century before George Orwell penned a famous opening line about a clock that struck thirteen (to be seen here), the 41-year-old Aleichem began a short story in exactly the same way. There is no evidence Orwell was inspired by the earlier appearance, but he was certainly a well-read person, and there is always a possibility that he might have seen the work at some point in his life.

In The Best of Sholem Aleichem (1979) Irving Howe and Ruth Wisse described the opening words of the short story this way: “A wonderfully appropriate and homey image for the sense of collapsing order.”

Paula: A Memoir (1994)

Allende began the book as a letter to her 28-year-old daughter Paula. In 1991, she was suffering from a serious liver disorder when a medication error put her into a drug-induced coma. Expecting an eventual recovery, Allende’s plan was to write her daughter a long letter describing everything she missed during her coma. When Paula died in 1992, Allende turned the book into a memoir.

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.

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.“

Moving From Me to We (2012)

This is an unusual—and intriguing—way to begin a self-help book, and it turns out to be 100% true. Anderson continued: “In fact what she did was turned into a Showtime TV series. She wanted to step into a dramatically different adventure for the next chapter of her life story. She was moved to express another side of herself, and then write about it. You see, in her other life, she’s ‘a respected specialist in developmental neurotoxicology and cancer epidemiology.’”

The woman’s real name was Dr. Brooke Magnanti, a highly trained English medical professional. In 2003, under the nom de plume Belle de Jour, she began writing a blog about her secret life as a sex worker. After receiving the Guardian’s Best Blog Award, de Jour’s profile increased dramatically, and she went on to write a number of bestselling books, some with terrific opening lines (see them here).

Flowers in the Attic (1979)

These are the opening words of the Prologue to the book. The narrator is 12-year-old Cathy Dollanganger, who was only twelve years old when her mother forced her and her three siblings to live secretly in the attic of their grandparents’ home.

In the opening paragraph, Cathy continued: “And as I begin to copy from the old memorandum journals that I kept for so long, a title comes as if inspired. Open the Window and Stand in the Sunshine. Yet, I hesitate to name our story that. For I think of us more as flowers in the attic.“

Letter to My Daughter (2008)

This is a modest beginning, but it clearly telegraphs what is to follow. It is what is contained in the second paragraph that makes Angelou’s opening words memorable. There, she continued with an observation that encapsulated what went on to become one of her most popular quotations (I’ve presented it in italics to make it more obvious): “My life has been long, and believing that life loves the liver of it, I have dared to try many things, sometimes trembling, but daring, still.”

Prior to the book’s publication, many Angelou fans were puzzled by the title, for it was well known that her only child was a boy that she had given birth to at age seventeen. Angelou quickly cleared the matter up by dedicating the book to the daughter she never had. She also brought her introductory words to a close by writing:

“I gave birth to one child, a son, but I have thousands of daughters. You are Black and White, Jewish and Muslim, Asian, Spanish-speaking, Native American and Aleut. You are fat and thin and pretty and plain, gay and straight, educated and unlettered, and I am speaking to you all. Here is my offering to you.”

"Men, Women, Sex and Darwin," in The New York Times Magazine (Feb. 21, 1999)

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.

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.”

“Old Love”, in A Quiver Full of Arrows (1980)

“The Luncheon”, in A Quiver Full of Arrows (1980)

Some opening lines are memorable not because they’re so beautifully written, but because they perfectly capture a common human experience. The narrator, an unnamed English author, continued: “I racked that section of my brain which is meant to store people, but it transmitted no reply. I realized I would have to resort to the old party trick of carefully worded questions until her answers jogged my memory.”

“A Marriage of True Minds” (1961),“ in Forewords and Afterwards (1973)

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)

A House of Sticks: Memoirs of a Bigamist’s Daughter (2016)

“Slow Days, Fast Company,“ the title story of Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, The Flesh, and L.A. (1977)

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.”

In Praise of Love (2009; with Nicholas Truong)

Badio, a well-known contemporary French philosopher, continued in the opening paragraph:

“There is, after all, a stock stage character, the philosopher in love, whose Stoic wisdom and well-rehearsed distrust of passion evaporate in their entirety the moment a dazzlingly beautiful woman sweeps into the room and blows him away forever.”

My Animals and Other Family (2013)

Describing that first meeting with her mother’s pet boxer a few days after her own birth, Balding continued: “I looked into her big brown eyes, pushed my pudgy fingers into her cavernous wrinkles and smelled her stale breath. It was an all-in sensory experience. I was home.” Balding’s heartwarming memoir went on to win the 2012 British Book Awards Autobiography of the Year.

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.“

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.“

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.”

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 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.

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.”

Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present (2020)

This is a highly unusual way for a serious scholar to begin a serious book about modern autocratic leaders, but I think you will agree that it is also highly effective in achieving two of the goals of all Great Opening Lines: (1) to “frame” the story about to be told, and (2) to get the reader to continue reading.

The book continues with a brief discussion between Berlusconi and one of his many mistresses, Patrizia D’Addario, about which bed they will be using that night. He replies that it will be a bed he received as a gift from his strongman pal, Vladimir Putin. Ben-Ghiat, a history professor at New York University, went on to explain: “Berlusconi’s ‘Putin bed’ symbolized the intimacy of a friendship sustained by the leaders’ common drive to exercise as much personal power as their political systems allowed and to appear to the world—and each other—as virile.”

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?

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.“

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).

Out of Africa (1937)

Part of the appeal of this opening line is that much can be deduced about the author from the first thirteen words, especially the word had. Clearly, Blixen no longer has the farm, and the entire first sentence contains a strong hint of wistfulness. There is also the clear suggestion that she is not a native of Africa, but someone who moved there from someplace else—and then grew to love the place.

In a 2017 “The Art of the Tale” blog post, the discerning eye of writer and editor Mary Dalton helped me see something in the opening line I had not seen before. Picking up on Blixen’s famous self-description that “I am not a novelist, really not even a writer; I am a storyteller,” Dalton viewed the opening line as more befitting a story, not a memoir. She wrote:

“Out of Africa doesn’t read like your average memoir. Rather, it’s life spun into a fantastic tale, where supernatural forces coexist with the everyday. The opening line…has the invoking nature of a prayer or chant, all round vowels and whispering consonants.”

Blixen, a beloved Danish writer who wrote fictional tales under the pen name Isak Dinesen, continued in the opening paragraph: “The equator runs across these highlands. A hundred miles to the North, and the farm lay at an altitude of over six thousand feet. In the day-time you felt that you had got high up, near to the sun, but the early mornings and evenings were limpid and restful, and the nights were cold.”

In 1985, Out of Africa was loosely adapted into a Sydney Pollack film starring Meryl Streep and Robert Redford. One of the year’s most acclaimed films, it was nominated for eleven Academy Awards, winning seven, including Best Picture and Best Director.

Spinster: Making a Life of One’s Own (2015)

Bolick continued with a one-sentence second paragraph: “Men have their own problems; this isn’t one of them.“

Fire Shut Up in My Bones: A Memoir (2014)

These are powerful opening words, and the intensity increases as Blow continued: “It was the gun my mother had insisted I take with me to college, ‘just in case.’ I had grabbed it from beneath my seat when I jumped into the car. I cast glances at it is I drove. I had to convince myself that I was indeed about to use it.“

“The ridges of the gas pedal pressed into the flesh of my foot as I raced down Interstate 20 toward my mother’s house, just twenty-five miles away. I had driven this lonely stretch of North Louisiana road from college to home a hundred times. It had never gone so slowly; I had never driven so fast.“

“I began to scream as a fresh round of tears erupted. ‘Motherfucker!’ I slammed my fists down on the steering wheel over and over. ’No! No!…Ah! Ah!’ In part I was letting it out. In part I was pumping myself up. I had never thought myself capable of killing. I was a twenty-year-old college student. But I was about to kill a man. My own cousin. Chester.”

What stimulated this volcano of emotion and anguish and deadly rage? In a phone call with his mother only a few minutes earlier, she said a family visitor wanted to say hello. When his older cousin Chester got on the line and said “What’s going on, boy?” Blow was immediately transported back in time to age seven, and overcome with a torrent of long-repressed memories of Chester—a teenager at the time—sexually abusing him. It’s a longer-than-typical opening to a memoir, but few can rival it in drama and power. About the book, writer Michaela Angela Davis said it was “A modern memoir that reads like a great classic novel.”

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).

Just Wait Until You Have Children of Your Own (1971; with Bill Keane)

With some books, it takes a few paragraphs to effectively get the ball rolling. Such is the case here. Bombeck continued:

“Young boys would pinch me in the swimming pool and exclaim, ‘Gee, ma’am, I’m sorry. I thought you were your sensuous daughter, Dale.’

“The entire family would gather around the piano and sing songs from the King Family album. And on Friday nights, we’d have a family council meeting to decide what flavor of ice cream their father, Ozzie, would bring home from the ice-cream parlor.

“It never worked out that way,”

“Car Hits a Tree,” syndicated column (Jan. 24, 1971); reprinted in Forever, Erma (1996)

“A Mother’s Eye,” syndicated column (Aug. 18, 1968); reprinted in Forever, Erma (1996)

In her opening paragraph, Bombeck continued: “Or, as we say, one glance is worth a thousand punches in the mouth.”

“Paint Tint Caper,” syndicated column (Sep. 4, 1965); reprinted in Forever, Erma (1996)

Bombeck published more than 4,000 syndicated columns in her career (the first appeared in 1965, the last in the year she died, 1996. All forms of writing benefit from great opening lines, but given the competition for reader’s eyes, they may be more important in newspaper columns and magazine articles than in books.

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.

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.”

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.“

The I Hate to Cook Book (1960)

I always enjoy a book—especially a non-fiction book—in which the author gets straight to the point. Bracken, one of her era’s most respected humorous writers, went on to explain:

“This book is for those of us who hate to, who have learned, through hard experience, that some activities become no less painful through repetition: childbearing, paying taxes, cooking. This book is for those of us who want to fold our big dishwater hands around a dry Martini instead of a wet flounder, come the end of a long day.”

A Window Over the Sink: A Mainly Affectionate Memoir (1981)

Flags of Our Fathers: Heroes of Iwo Jima (2000; with Ron Powers)

It’s a simple, straightforward, and immensely powerful first sentence. The gripping quality of the opening words continued as Bradley went on in the opening paragraph:

“For a few days I set aside my comfortable life—my business concerns, my life in Rye, New York—and made a pilgrimage to the other side of the world, to a primitive flyspeck island in the Pacific. There, waiting for me, was the mountain the boys had climbed in the midst of a terrible battle half a century earlier. One of them was my father. The mountain was called Suribachi; the island Iwo Jima.”

Bradley’s father John, a U.S. Navy corpsman, was identified as one of the six soldiers who raised the American flag at The Battle of Iwo Jima. The dramatic scene was captured by Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal, and it went one to win him a 1945 Pulitzer Prize (fittingly, the photograph graced the cover of the book).

After Bradley returned home from the war, he never said a word about the famous photograph or his other wartime experiences. But when he died at age 70 in 1994, his family found boxes of letters, photographs, and other items. That discovery triggered something in son James, who soon began working on a book that ultimately led to his personal pilgrimage to the site. In a New York Times review, Richard Bernstein hailed Flags of Our Fathers as “a touching eulogy” and “one of the most instructive and moving books on war and its aftermath that we are likely to see.” The bestselling book went on to be adapted into a 2006 film directed and scored (yes, scored) by Clint Eastwood.

In a stunning historical footnote, the U.S. Navy announced in 2016 that two of the six soldiers in the iconic 1945 photograph were wrongly identified, including John Bradley. In a New York Times article on the news, journalist Michael S. Schmidt wrote that James Bradley concurred with the assessment, adding that Bradley “said that his father had participated in an earlier flag-raising and mistakenly believed that it had been the one captured by Mr. Rosenthal.”

What Looks Like Bravery: An Epic Journey Through Loss to Love (2023)

Primarily because of the magnificent phrase, “draped like hormonal Dalí clocks,” these opening words of the Prologue are so delicious that we feel compelled to read on in hopes of finding similar tasty morsels in what is to come. And, believe me, they do come.

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.

“The Real Life of a Sugar Daddy,” in Gentleman’s Quarterly (August 27, 2015)

When Jacob Feldman, editor of The Sunday Long Read, was asked by editors of The Electric Typewriter to select “10 of his all-time favorite articles,” he included this one, adding about the piece: “To put it simply, this was the best written story of 2015, starting with the first line.”

In the opening paragraph of her article, Brodesser-Akner continued: “He had arranged to meet her so that he might size her up and determine whether he wanted to give her a monthly stipend in exchange for regular sex and sometimes maybe dinner. In other words: Was there chemistry? Was she blonde and blue-eyed, the way he liked them? Was she thin “but not anorexic, a shapely body, you know?” Could he talk to her? That was very important. It was a little important. It wasn’t that important. Anyway, she asked for money up front, and he sent her $800. She didn’t show to the meet, and that’s the last time Thurston Von Moneybags ever got hustled again. Now he meets the girls for lunch before he offers them an ahem arrangement, and he is very clear. He doesn’t give them money until their second date, when they’re in the bedroom.”

Feldman went on to add about the article: “It only gets better from [the first line]. In investigating the love-for-money economy budding on sites like SeekingArrangement, Taffy Brodesser-Akner not only entertained us, she made us think about what it means to ‘get what you want in this world.’”

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.”

Sex and the Single Girl: The Unmarried Woman’s Guide to Men (1962)

These are the opening words of a book that exploded on the publishing scene, selling well over two million books in the month after it was published. The book remained on all the major bestseller lists for over a year, and in 1964 was loosely adapted into a popular film, starring Natalie Wood. Published a year before The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan, Sex and the Single Girl is now regarded as a ground-breaking work in women’s literature.

In the book, after describing the couple’s glamorous, upscale life, Brown sent an important If-I-can-do-it-so-can-you message to her female readers: “I am not beautiful, or even pretty. I once had the world’s worst case of acne. I am not bosomy or brilliant. I grew up in a small town. I didn’t go to college. My family was, and is, desperately poor and I have always helped support them. I’m an introvert and I am sometimes mean and cranky. But I don’t think it’s a miracle that I married my husband. I think I deserved him!”

After graduating from secretarial school in 1941, Brown worked as a secretary for well over a decade before finally landing a job as a copywriter for a Los Angeles advertising agency. Within a few years, she became the highest paid female copywriter on the West Coast, and in 1959 married the successful Hollywood film producer David Brown. It was Brown’s idea for her to write Sex and the Single Girl, but, as Dwight Garner put it in a New York Times article, “It was her bright, no-nonsense voice that brought the book to life.”

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.

Loose Lips (1999)

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.

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.

“Fish Story,” in Forbes Life (November 2012); reprinted in But Enough About You: Essays (2014)

In the second paragraph, Buckley continued: “I did not utter aloud the next sentence that formed in my mind: ‘How convenient for flushing them down the toilet after they have lived to the ripe old age of forty-eight hours.’”

Telling Secrets (1991)

This is one of the most powerful opening paragraphs I have ever read. Rarely have I seen such a grim—or even tragic—story begun in such a straightforward, matter-of-fact way. In the opening paragraph, Buechner (whose name is pronounced BEEK-nuhr) continued:

“Except for a memorial service for his Princeton class the next spring, by which time we had moved away to another part of the world altogether, there was no funeral because on both my mother’s side and my father’s there was no church connection and funerals were simply not part of the tradition.”

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.”

An American Marriage: The Untold Story of Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd (2021)

In the book’s opening paragraph, Burlingame—described by Time magazine as “a towering figure in Lincoln scholarship”—continued with this revealing anecdote: “During the Civil War, he pardoned a Union soldier who had deserted to return home and wed his sweetheart, who reportedly had been flirting with another swain in his absence. As the president signed the necessary document sparing the miscreant’s life, he said: ‘I want to punish the young man—probably in less than a year he will wish I had withheld the pardon.’” This was one of my choices for a Smerconish.com post on “Twenty-One of the Best Opening Lines of 2021.“

In his book, Burlingame attempted to set the historical record straight by telling the unvarnished truth about Lincoln’s notoriously unhappy marriage. On top of the countless monumental problems the 16th U.S. President wrestled with, Burlingame wrote that “he had to cohabit the White House with a psychologically unbalanced woman whose indiscrete and abusive behavior taxed his legendary patience and forbearance to the limit.”

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.

Gracie: A Love Story (1988)

Few memoirs in history have opened more poignantly. Burns continued: “Her real name was Grace Ethel Cecile Rosalie Allen. Gracie Allen. But for those forty years audiences in small-time and big-time vaudeville houses and movie theaters and at home listening to their radios or watching television knew her, and loved her, simply as Gracie. Just Gracie. She was on a first-name basis with America.

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.

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.

“Pitch Memory,” in Emperor of the Air: Stories (1989)

To my mind, this is a superb opening paragraph: economical (at 40 words), but long enough to provide grounding and texture, and with a lovely little twist at the end.

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.

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.”

O Pioneers! (1913)

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.

My Father, Charlie Chaplin (1960; with N. And M. Rau)

This powerful opening line reads more like an autobiography of a son than a biography of the father—and that simple fact makes us want to read on. The author continued: “And then suddenly there was the light. There were people caressing me, putting cold compresses on my head, for I was almost rigid in my terror.”

Chaplain goes on to list the people who were around to comfort him during his night terrors: “My grandmother, my great-grandmother, my mother, and sometimes even my great-grandfather.” Notably missing from the list—it is quite apparent—is his father.

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 Story of an Hour,“ in Vogue magazine (Dec. 6, 1894)

When Chopin’s story—arguably her most popular—first appeared, it was titled “The Dream of an Hour.“ It was retitled when republished a year later, and is now remembered by the revised title. When it was first published, the story was considered quite shocking for its portrayal of Louise Mallard’s feeling of liberated happiness when she begins to think of a future without her husband in it.

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

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.”

“A Personal Tribute to Mothers and Role Models,” in OpEdNews.com (May 7, 2022)

In this beautiful—and bittersweet—opener, Clift leads readers down an idyllic path until, at the end, she ingeniously departs from it. Later this year, when I compile my annual list of “Twenty-Two of the Best Opening Lines of 2022,” this one will certainly be in contention.

Clift’s essay explored a painful theme in human life—many mothers are painfully deficient in meeting the needs of their children, and when our own falls short, we look for great mother-figures in other families. In the article, Clift, a New England journalist, writer, and political activist, continued:

“I lived across the street in a house that became a place of illness, loneliness, and ‘quiet despair.’ My mother’s chronic depression began there as my father’s tense nature worsened when business failures mounted. So I began to virtually reside in the perfect Cape Cod cottage and to make of myself a part of that Dick-and-Jane family, to internalize their traditions, to survive my childhood pain.”

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.”

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).

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.”

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.”

“Barbara Warley Was Loved by Everyone,” in A Lowcountry Heart: Reflections on a Writing Life (2016)

Conroy was sixty-eight when he wrote these words, the opening sentence of a eulogy he was delivering for the wife of one of his best friends from college. When I first read the opening sentence, I was immediately reminded of something May Sarton wrote in her 1984 memoir At Seventy: “I suppose real old age begins when one looks backward rather than forward.“

Over the years, I’ve noticed that eulogies penned by writers are often as much about the people writing the eulogy as those they are eulogizing—and that is certainly the case here. In reflecting back to when he first met Warley, for example, Conroy wrote: “Instinctively, we identified ourselves as members of the unhappy tribe who come from troubled and deeply flawed families.”

Two years after Warley’s death, Conroy himself died, at age 70, of a fast-spreading pancreatic cancer.

The Middle Place (2008)

Glitter and Glue: A Memoir (2013)

Corrigan continued: “Consequently, we were never one of those Mommy & Me pairs who sat close or giggled. She didn’t wink at me or gush about how pretty I looked or rub my back to help me fall asleep. She was not a big fan of deep conversation, and she still doesn’t go for a lot of physical contact. She looked at motherhood as less a joy to be relished than as a job to be done, serious work with serious repercussions, and I left childhood assuming our way of being with each other, adversarial but functional, was as it would be.”

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.”

A Childhood: The Biography of a Place (1978; re-isssued 2022)

These are the intriguing opening words of a memoir that was described by The New Yorker’s Casey Cep as “One of the finest memoirs ever written.” About the meaning that the opening line had for Crews, Cep wrote: “He knew that history, even our own personal history, can take the form of myth if we let it, and he hints at this in the memoir’s opening…. What he then recounts is something he was once told.” Cep then helpfully added:

“Much of what we know about the world is secondhand, as is everything we know about the past, and we demonize or mythologize it at our peril. Find a way to cherish it, sure, but Crews knew better than to reject the world that made him or to romanticize what he barely survived.”

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.

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.’“

“Prince Harry and the Value of Silence,” in The New York Times (Jan. 7, 2023)

Davis, the daughter of Ronald and Nancy Reagan, was referring to her 1992 autobiography The Way I See It (a no-holds-barred memoir that was described by J. D. Podolsky in People magazine as “The work of an angry daughter with scores still to settle”).

Davis decided to revisit the whole idea of “writing a book I now wish I hadn’t written” after reading Prince Harry’s controversial new memoir Spare (2023). Reflecting on what she learned after her own unfortunate “tell-all” memoir, she went on to write:

“Of course, people generally don’t respond well to being embarrassed and exposed in public. And in the ensuing years, I’ve learned something about truth: It’s way more complicated than it seems when we’re young. There isn’t just one truth, our truth—the other people who inhabit our story have their truths as well.”

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 Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl (2005)

In early 2003, Dr. Brooke Magnanti, an American-born British medical professional (Ph.D. in forensic pathology) began writing a blog detailing her secret life as a sex worker. Writing under the name Belle de Jour, she won the Guardian’s Best Blog Award at the end of the year.

In choosing her nom de plume (which translates into “Beauty of the Day”), Magnanti was inspired by the title of Luis Buñuel’s 1967 film starring Catherine Deneuve as a French housewife who secretly worked in a high-class brothel while her husband was at work (Buñuel’s film, in turn, was an adaptation of Joseph Kessel’s 1928 novel by the same title).

The Guardian award dramatically increased interest in the blog and soon resulted in this 2005 book—with the jarring, but almost perfect, opening sentence you see above. An immediate bestseller in England, the book was soon adapted by ITV into the British television series “Secret Diary of a Call Girl,” starring Billie Piper. After an enormously successful airing in England, the series was picked up by Showtime for an American audience. Not surprisingly, de Jour went on to write a number of sequels, some of which also had memorable openings (you’ll see them below).

The Further Adventures of a London Call Girl (2006)

Belle de Jour’s Guide to Men (2009)

With the “teaser” comment at the end, we wonder where, exactly, de Jour is going—but we’re damn sure going to continue reading to find out.

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?”

Snapshots of My Father, John Silber (2022)

When I first came upon this forthright opening line, I thought to myself, “I’m sure this candid admission will resonate with countless other authors as well.” In Devlin’s intimate portrait of her father, the long-time president of Boston University, she continued about her mother:

“Did I not learn anything from her example? She would see telling our family’s story as akin to undressing in front of a picture window and parading back and forth, making a spectacle of myself. There could be no good reason for doing so.”

The Year of Magical Thinking (2006)

The “it” here was the 2003 death of Didion’s husband John Gregory Dunn—from a sudden heart attack while the couple were seated at the dinner table in their home. The remainder of the book chronicled Didion’s attempts over the next year to live and function without a man she’d been married to for nearly forty years. The book went on to win the 2005 National Book Award for Nonfiction.

Didion’s coping efforts were severely affected by the illness of her adult daughter, who was lying unconscious—from a serious case of pneumonia—in a New York hospital at the time of her father’s death (she died of pancreatitis in 2005). Didion wrote about the loss of her daughter in yet another book of mourning and grieving, Blue Nights, published in 2011.

Are Men Necessary? When Sexes Collide (2005)

Dowd, a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The New York Times, is best known for her political commentary, but she also wrote extensively about gender dynamics. She previewed her views on the subject when she continued: “I had a moment of dazzling clarity when I was twenty-seven, a rush of confidence that I had cracked the code. But it was, alas, an illusion. I think I overcomplicated their simplicity. Or oversimplified their simplicity. Are they as complicated as a pile of wood? Or as simple as a squid?”

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)

“The Losses We Share,” in The New York Times (Nov. 25, 2020)

This is a deeply personal—and a remarkably effective—way to begin an Op-Ed column. The opening was so impressive, in fact, that I selected it as one of “Twenty of the Best Opening Lines of 2020” in a Smerconish.com post.

“Make You Feel My Love,“ on the album Time Out of Mind (1997)

Most people don’t associate Bob Dylan with romantic music, but these are the opening lyrics of one of the most beautiful love songs ever written. Since 1997, the song has been covered by more than 500 artists, making it an American pop music “standard.” In the second verse, Dylan continued:

“When evening shadows and the stars appear
And there is no one there to dry your tears
I could hold you for a million years
To make you feel my love.”

In a little-known fact, when music fans first heard the song, it was not sung by Dylan, but by Billy Joel. In August of 1997, a full month before Dylan’s Time Out of Mind album was released, Joel included his rendition of the song in his Greatest Hits Volume III album.

Two years later, in 1999, Garth Brooks’s rendition was nominated for Best Male Country Vocal Performance at the 41st Grammy Awards, and Bob Dylan was nominated for Best Country Song. Neither won.

In 2008, “Make You Feel My Love” was the only “cover” song on Adele’s debut album 19. Although she originally wanted to include only songs she wrote or co-wrote, she loved the song so much when her manager introduced it to her that she changed her mind just before the album was pressed. It was a good decision. In 2013, Heart Radio listed Adele’s version of the song as the United Kingdom’s “Number One Song of All Time” in its Top 500 Hall of Fame songs.

Dylan’s original recording of the song may be heard here. Billy Joel’s official video version can be seen here. A live performance of the song by Garth Brooks may be seen here. And the official video of Adele’s cover may be seen here.

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.“

Adrenaline Junkie: A Memoir (2018)

Few memoirs begin with the admission of an act of thievery, and it immediately makes us wonder what other fascinating disclosure will be coming in future pages. In the opening paragraph, Edgerton—a former convict who went on to become a popular writer and writing teacher—further deepened our interest by continuing:

“Most of them were foreign ones he’d picked up overseas during World War II. I had no idea how I planned to spend English half-pence or German Reichspfennig coins or if I ever planned to spend them at all. I just wanted them because I thought I could take them without getting caught. After he put his belt away, and I pulled my pants back up, my father made me take four of the smallest coins and swallow them.”

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?“

Move On: Adventures in the Real World (1991)

Ellerbee continued: “Next I tore down the wall. After that, I ripped up the floor, raised high the roof beam, put up a skylight big enough to bring the moon home, put down a Jacuzzi big enough to do the backstroke across, planted flowers so fragile they faint if you frown twice, painted everything else a lovely shade of Childless White and watched my son go nuts.“

“Vaginal Politics,” in Crazy Salad (1975)

“Reunion,” in Crazy Salad (1975)

Ephron continued: “How to explain the significance of it? It is a Friday night in June, the first night of the tenth reunion of the Class of 1962 of Wellesley College, and a member of my class has just returned from the bathroom with the news. A boy and girl are taking a shower together. No one can believe it.”

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.”

“Moving On,” in I Feel Bad About My Neck (2006)

“The D Word,” in I Remember Nothing (2010)

Ephron continued: “I have now been married to my third husband for more than twenty years. But when you’ve had children with someone you’re divorced from, divorce defines everything; it’s the lurking fact, a slice of anger in the pie of your brain.”

“Scales” (1980), in The Red Convertible: Selected and New Stories, 1978-2008 (2009)

This is not simply a great opening line, it is one of the best things ever said on the topic (one day, I’m hoping to do a book titled The Single Best Thing Ever Said on Just About Any Topic You Can Think Of, and this is my Number One choice for observations about jellybeans).

Shame (1997)

I was completely unfamiliar with Ernaux’s work when it was announced in 2022 that, at age 82, she had won the Nobel Prize for Literature. You can imagine my pleasant surprise, then, when the first of her books that I read contained this powerful opening line.

Arnaux was twelve when she witnessed the event in question, and the memoir was her attempt to chronicle and examine the circumstances of her life at the time. In a New Yorker profile on the author, staff writer Alexandra Schwartz described the first words as “unforgettable.” And in an Amazon.com review, writer Wendy Smith wrote:

“You’d expect a book that begins with these words to be a raw, anguished account of childhood trauma, but prize-winning French author Ernaux disdains such American-style obviousness.” She later added: “This is a memoir in the classic Gallic tradition: lucid, spare, impeccably reasoned and written, completely devoid of self-pity. There’s not an excess word or a facile emotion anywhere in her elegant text, which compels readers’ sympathy all the more forcefully by never asking for it.”

Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty (1999)

It’s hard to imagine a better way to open a book on the nature and importance of beauty in human life, and Etcoff—a professor at Harvard Medical School and psychologist at Massachusetts General Hospital—finished off her first paragraph in an equally impressive way:

“Asked why people desire physical beauty, Aristotle said, ‘No one that is not blind could ask that question.’ Beauty ensnares hearts, captures minds, and stirs up emotional wildfires. From Plato to pinups, images of human beauty have catered to a limitless desire to see and imagine an ideal human form.”

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.”

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.

The Wine Lover’s Daughter: A Memoir (2017)

This is the delightful opening line of one of the best father-daughter memoirs ever written. About the book, writer and fellow wine lover Christopher Buckley wrote:

“If Anne Fadiman’s book about her father were a wine, it would merit a ‘100’ rating, along with all the oeno-superlatives: ‘smooth,’ ‘elegant,’ ‘brilliant,’ ‘rounded,’ ‘with a dazzling, heart-warming finish.’ But as it is a book and not a wine, let’s call it what it is: a stunning, original, beautifully written, clear-eyed yet tear-inducing account of a daughter’s love for her famous father; and into the bargain, the best family memoir yet to come out of the Baby Boom generation.”

In her opening paragraph, Fadiman—a truly gifted writer—continued: “Nearly every evening of my childhood, I watched him cut the capsule—the foil sleeve that sheathes the bottleneck—with a sharp knife. Then he plunged the bore of a butterfly corkscrew into the exact center of the cork, twirled the handle, and, after the brass levers rose like two supplicant arms, pushed them down and gently twisted out the cork. Its pop was satisfying but restrained, not the fustian whoop of a champagne cork, but a well-bred thwick.”

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.”

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.”

In the Darkroom (2016)

This is the haunting first sentence of one of the most interesting father-daughter stories I’ve ever read (it went on to win the 2016 Kirkus Prize for nonfiction and was a finalist for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in Biography). In the opening paragraph, Faludi—an influential American feminist—continued:

“The project began with a grievance, the grievance of a daughter whose parent had absconded from her life. I was in pursuit of a scofflaw, an artful dodger who had skipped out on so many things—obligation, affection, culpability, contrition. I was preparing an indictment, amassing discovery for a trial. But somewhere along the line, the prosecutor became a witness.”

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”).

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.”

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.”

Dirtbag, Massachusetts: A Confessional (2022)

This is the spectacular first sentence of one of the most intriguing memoirs of the year. I was delighted to honor it in my compilation of “The Best Opening Lines of 2022” on Smerconish.com (see the full list here).

In a starred BookPage review, Isaac Fitzgerald wrote: “Isaac Fitzgerald grabs readers’ attention with the title of his memoir…and never lets go. He’s a mesmerizing storyteller who deploys unexpected delights from his very first line.” In the book’s second paragraph, Fitzgerald continued:

“That’s the way I open every story when I’m asked about my childhood. I was a child of passion! A happy little accident. Or, put another way, I was born of sin: a mistake in human form, a bomb aimed perfectly to blow up both my parents’ lives.”

Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe (1987)

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.”

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).

Go Back and Get It: A Memoir of Race, Inheritance, and Intergenerational Healing (2023)

This powerful first sentence from the memoir’s Prologue is an immediate—and deeply poignant—reminder about a unique experience facing black Americans attempting to trace their roots: they must often look for white people to find their own ancestors. In the opening paragraph, Ford continued with a stark assessment of the situation:

“Any African American can expect that 19 percent of their ancestors were White men. So, the enslavers might also be your relatives.”

Ford’s decision to rigorously research her family history went into high gear on her thirty-eighth birthday, when an internet search led her to a family photograph that included her great-great grandmother, Tempy Burton, and her great-grandmother, Josephine Stuart. Here’s how she described it:

“In 1858, when Colonel W. R. Stuart, a wealthy Louisiana cotton broker, married Elizabeth McCauley, a girl from a long line of North Carolina plantation owners, her family gave the couple a slave named Tempy Burton as a wedding gift. Elizabeth was sickly and couldn’t have children, but Tempy could and did have six of them with her new master, the Colonel. My great-grandmother, Josephine, born a decade after slavery ended, was their youngest child.”

About the book, Joyce Carol Oates wrote: “A fascinating American odyssey quite unlike any other you are likely to encounter, beautifully written, heartfelt, at times painfully candid, and deeply moving.” And I liked Ford’s first sentence so much that I included it in my annual Smerconish.com list of “23 of the Best Opening Lines of 2023” (see the complete 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.”

“Abyss,” in A Multitude of Sins (2002)

The narrator continued in the story’s second sentence: “Then each went to the restroom and made a private, lying cell phone call to account for their whereabouts during the next few hours.”

“Under the Radar,” in A Multitude of Sins (2002)

“Privacy,” in A Multitude of Sins (2002)

The narrator, an unnamed writer—or, perhaps, a former writer—continued in the short story’s second paragraph: “We were living in a large city in the northeast. It was winter. February. The coldest month. I was, of course, still trying to write, and my wife was working as a translator for a small publishing company that specialized in Czech scientific papers. We had been married for ten years and were still enjoying that strange, exhilarating illusion that we had survived the worst of life’s hardships.”

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 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.

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.”

The Diary of Anne Frank (1947; originally titled The Annex)

This was the very first entry written by Anne Frank in a diary she’d been given on her 13th birthday. Bound with red-and-white checkered cloth, the book had a small lock on the front, giving the newly minted teenager a secure feeling that no one but her would be able to read the contents. An exceptional student in a local Montessori school, Anne was already dreaming of a literary career—and the diary’s opening words reveal a sophistication beyond her years.

In February of 1934, Frank was four-and-a-half-years-old and living temporarily with her grandmother when she joined her parents and older sister Margot in Amsterdam, Netherlands. A year earlier, after the Nazi Party won the federal elections and Hitler became Chancellor, thousands of Jewish families began fleeing their native Germany and settling in neighboring European countries. The Franks lived a comfortable (if slightly uneasy) life until May of 1940, when Germany formally occupied the Netherlands and began to identify and deport the country’s Jews.

In the summer of 1942, just after Margot received a letter ordering her to report to a work camp, the family began hiding in a secret room in a building where her father worked. The “secret annex,” as they sometimes called it, was hidden behind a bookcase, and it kept them and a number of other Amsterdam Jews safe until they were arrested by the Gestapo in 1944. Anne and Margot were first sent to Auschwitz, and then the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where they died—most likely of typhus—several months later.

After the war, Anne’s father Otto—the only surviving member of the Frank family—returned to Amsterdam to discover that his secretary had saved Anne’s diary. To honor his daughter’s dream of becoming a writer, he published a Dutch version in 1947.

First published in English as Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl in 1952, the book failed to find an audience and was out of print the following year. In 1955, “The Diary of Anne Frank”, a play by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, debuted on Broadway. A critical success, the play won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1956 and greatly fueled interest in Anne’s story. In 1959, the play was adapted into the “The Diary of Anne Frank,” a film starring Millie Perkins (it was nominated for seven Oscars, winning three.) Now regarded as a cinematic classic, the film re-ignited interest in Anne’s diary, which went on to become one of the world’s most popular books, translated into more than 70 languages and selling more than 35 million copies.

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.”

This is How Your Marriage Ends (2022)

The Escape Artist: A Memoir (2020)

This is not only a spectacular opening line, it’s one of the most quotable observations I’ve seen on the subject (I’ve also happily added it to the sisters section of “Dr. Mardy’s Dictionary of Metaphorical Quotations”).

I only recently happened upon Fremont’s book (her second memoir, following up the bestselling After Long Silence in 2011). If I’d come across it when it was published, her first sentence would have made my end-of-year list of “The Twenty Best Opening Lines of 2020” (to be seen here).

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.”

The Art of Loving (1956)

Opening a book with a rhetorical question is a time-honored way to immediately engage the reader, and Fromm—one of the great popularizers of psychological concepts to a lay audience—does that very nicely here.

In the opening paragraph, he continued: “Then it requires knowledge and effort. Or is love a pleasant sensation, which to experience is a matter of chance, something one ‘falls into’ if one is lucky? This little book is based on the former premise, while undoubtedly the majority of people today believe in the latter.”

“Mrs. O’Grady,” in A Thousand Friends (1974)

A well-crafted rhetorical question can occasionally be a perfect way to open an article or essay, as Fuldheim demonstrates here. She continued:

“How many women stay married though they experience a dull nagging unhappiness; stay because after years of marriage they have developed no skill to qualify for a job and if they are over forty, their age is an additional hindrance. If ever there are lives led in “quiet desperation,” they are marriages without friendship, dignity, love, and passion.“

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).

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.”

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.

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.“

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.”

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.

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 Muse of the Coyote Ugly Saloon,” in Esquire magazine (March 1997)

These are the opening words of the original Esquire article that turned an East Village bar into a New York City cultural landmark. Early in Gilbert’s career, while attempting to make a living as a working journalist, she supplemented her income with waitressing and bartending jobs, including a stint at the Coyote Ugly Saloon. Her article inspired the 2000 film “Coyote Ugly.“

By the way, if you don’t know the meaning of the slang term “coyote ugly,“ a Wikipedia entry says it “refers to the feeling of waking up after a one-night stand, and discovering that one’s arm is underneath someone who is so physically repulsive that one would gladly chew it off without waking the person just so one can get away without being discovered. Coyotes are known to gnaw off limbs if they are stuck in a trap, to facilitate escape.”

Eat, Pray, Love (2006)

Gilbert continued: “Oh, but there are so many reasons why this would be a terrible idea. To begin with, Giovanni is ten years younger than I am, and—like most Italian guys in their twenties—he still lives with his mother. These facts alone make him an unlikely romantic partner for me, given that I am a professional American woman in my mid-thirties, who has just come through a failed marriage and a devastating, interminable divorce, followed immediately by a passionate love affair that ended in sickening heartbreak. This loss upon loss has left me feeling sad and brittle and about seven thousand years old. Purely as a matter of principle I wouldn’t inflict my sorry, busted-up old self on the lovely, unsullied Giovanni.”

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.”

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.”

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.”

“A Most Ingenious Paradox,” in The Flamingo’s Smile: Reflections in Natural History (1985)

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.”

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.“

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.’”

“Half the World Has a Clitoris. Why Don’t Doctors Study It?” in The New York Times (October 17, 2022)

In the world of journalism, a great opening line is commonly called a lede, and they don’t get much better than this first sentence of Gross’s story about a registered nurse’s medical misadventures after her gynecologist recommended a vulval biopsy.

Havelock Ellis: A Biography (1980)

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.

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.

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.”

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.”

“Who Are We?” in Sex Tips for Girls (1983)

Playing off the famous Thomas Paine observation, this is the opening line of Heimel’s first published collection of articles that she had written for New York Magazine and The Village Voice. You can see Paine’s historic first sentence here.

“How to Find Someone to Fall in Love With,” in Sex Tips for Girls (1983)

When I first read these wry and witty opening words many decades ago, it forever changed the way I looked at so-called women’s magazines.

To drive her point home, Heimel continued: “How to make him happy in bed, how to choose his socks, how to tell if he’s screwing his secretary, and how to prepare his income tax returns are, according to these magazines, topics deemed monumental in importance.”

“Big Brother is Us,” in Get Your Tongue Out of My Mouth, I’m Kissing You Good-Bye! (1993)

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.

“The Afterlife,” in The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel (2006)

These fascinating opening words describe a social reality I’ve since confirmed as true, but had never really thought about before reading Hempel’s wonderful short story. The narrator is the unnamed daughter of the widower in question, and, while her age is not mentioned, she comes across as someone in her late teens.

Inspired by Hempel’s own experiences after the death of her mother, the story captured the many different—and often hilarious—strategies that single women employed to win her father’s affection. In the end, they all failed, and there was only one conclusion for the daughter to reach: “My father’s life had ended with my mother’s death, and…what he inhabited now was a kind of afterlife—not dead, but not alive to possibility, to what else one might still choose.”

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.

“Syringe,” in The Remembered Arts Journal (June 28, 2016)

In five simple words, the goal of all great opening lines is achieved—the reader feels compelled to read on to see where the story is going. In the second paragraph, the narrator continued:

“There were many times when she thought she’d lost him, but he would rally, surprising her and the other family members who, at the urging of his doctor, had joined her at bedside to say goodbye. Freda’s emotions were whipsawed by these false alarms to the point where her heart became numb, and the man in the hospital bed, the man she’d met and married thirty-two years before, appeared as if a stranger.”

When I learned that the author was alive today because of a lung transplant in 2015, I believed his short story might have autobiographical elements. Henry confirmed my suspicions with this reply to my query:

“The story is a small mystery that centers around a batch of composition notebooks that Freda’s late husband used to communicate when on a hospital ventilator or tracheal tube. It was based loosely on my own experience—five months in hospital post-transplant. I still have the seven notebooks I filled during the weeks I couldn’t speak.”

“The Gift of the Magi” (1905), in The Four Million (1906)

When the story was first published in The New York Sunday World on Dec. 10, 1905, it was titled “Gifts of the Magi.” The title was changed, but nothing else, when it was reprinted a year later in The Four Million anthology.

In the second paragraph, the narrator continued by describing Della’s emotional state, and he concluded with an observation that went on to become one of O. Henry’s most famous quotations (I’ve placed the key portion in italics to make it more obvious): “There was clearly nothing to do but flop down on the shabby little couch and howl. So Della did it. Which instigates the moral reflection that life is made up of sobs, sniffles, and smiles, with sniffles predominating.”

Of the hundreds of short stories Henry penned in his career, this sentimental Christmastime tale became his most popular. It’s been adapted to film four separate times, the first in 1917, and the best—starring Jeanne Crain and Farley Granger—in O. Henry’s Full House, a 1952 film anthology of five of the author’s most memorable short stories.

Parenthetically, many naysayers have asserted that, once the pennies were taken away, it would have been impossible for Della to get to $1.27 with the remaining coins. Ignore them, for they haven’t done their homework. in 1905, two-cent and three-cent coins were still in circulation, and that would have certainly done the trick.

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.”

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.

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.”

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 Hite Report: A Nationwide Study on Female Sexuality (1976)

This is the frank and unequivocal first sentence of a book that exploded on the national scene in 1976. Building on the work of Kinsey and, after him, Masters & Johnson, Hite was a previously unknown sex researcher who brought a feminist perspective to human sexuality—and who famously concluded that women didn’t need sexual intercourse, or even men, to experience sexual gratification. A 2020 New York Times obituary wrote about her: “However obvious her conclusions might seem today, they were seismic at the time.” An international bestseller, her book went on to sell nearly 50 million copies. In her opening paragraph, she continued:

“Researchers, looking for statistical ‘norms,’ have asked all the wrong questions for all the wrong reasons—and all too often wound up telling women how they should feel rather than asking them how they do feel.”

As the years passed and more controversial books followed, questions about the quality of Hite’s research—and her life—fueled a conservative backlash that made her life in America so miserable that she ultimately renounced her U.S. citizenship in 1995 to formally became a German citizen.

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.”

Lady Sings the Blues (1956)

This is one of the truly classic opening lines in publishing history. Not long after the book came out, the editors of London’s New Statesman magazine were so taken with the intriguing first sentence that they announced a competition in which readers were invited to submit “similarly explosive first or last sentences from a real or imagined biography.“ None of the hundred-plus entries came close to the quality of Holiday’s original words, though, and they were all awarded only consolation prizes—along with an admission on the part of the editors that they had greatly underestimated the difficulty of the challenge.

The editors of the magazine went on to provide Holiday with a most memorable compliment: “In 23 superbly chosen words, she has established her background, recorded at least five relevant facts, illustrated (by her method of doing so) one facet of her own character and made firm friends with the reader by a breathtaking and naughty dénouement.“ And about the submissions they received from contestants, they wrote: “Too many of her imitators felt that vulgarity or sheer improbability were satisfactory substitutes for the artfully conjured impudence and shock which characterized the original.“

Despite the legendary status of the book’s opening words, they are not factually true. In Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth (2015), biographer John Szwed described the book as “a form of autobiographical fiction.“ He went on to write: “When Billie was born, her mother was nineteen, her father seventeen. They never married and had never lived together in a little house with a picket fence on Durham Street in Baltimore. She was not born in Baltimore but in Philadelphia.“

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.

“Conversation on the Corner,” in Simple Speaks His Mind (1950)

It’s rare for a literary opening line to herald a major cultural shift within an entire segment of the American population, but Hughes was able to do that very nicely in this 1950 short story.

“Blue Evening,” in Simple Speaks His Mind (1950)

The words come from Simple’s friend and foil, Ananias Boyd, who encounters his pal in a neighborhood bar. The following dialogue unfolds:

“Another hang-over?” “Nothing that simple. This is something I thought never would happen to me.” “What?” I asked “That a woman could put me down….”

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.’”

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.

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.

“A Village After Dark,” in The New Yorker (May 14, 2001)

The narrator, clearly an older man who is beginning to sense a loss of capability, continued: “So it was that on arriving at the village just after dark I failed to find my bearings at all. I could hardly believe I was in the same village in which not so long ago I had lived and come to exercise such influence.”

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.

“My Father’s Shoes,” in The Boston Globe (April 15, 1999)

The best way to describe this dramatic opener is “arresting.” As soon as its read, it not only gets the reader’s attention, it holds it for some time after.

Jacoby went on to write: “It was in September 1997, during a trip he’d always insisted he wouldn’t take. He never wanted to go back to his native Czechoslovakia, he’d said; never wanted to revisit Auschwitz, where his parents, his brothers, and his two younger sisters were murdered by the Germans in 1944.”

“Louisa Pallant,” in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine (February 1888)

This is one of James’s very best opening lines, and one of his least well-known. In an observation that brilliantly captures an eternal truth about the human experience, the line opens a story about how the beautiful Louisa has rejected the unnamed narrator for a richer man. The marriage turns out to be a disaster, however, and after her husband’s death, Louisa has been left with only a pittance. She goes on to raise a child who is also quite beautiful, and who embodies many of her own flaws, only more so (if the story sounds familiar, it contains hints of Dicken’s 1860 classic, Great Expectations).

The unnamed narrator continued: “I was once treated to a revelation which startled and touched me in the nature of a person with whom I had been acquainted—well, as I supposed, for years, whose character I had had good reasons, heaven knows, to appreciate and in regard to whom I flattered myself I had nothing more to learn.”

Wandering in Strange Lands: A Daughter of the Great Migration Reclaims Her Roots (2020)

Jerkins continued: “He pulled me to his side and said he had something to show me. I assumed that is was a gift. He would regularly visit me at my mother’s home, bringing niceties along with his charisma and swagger. Instead, he pulled out his wallet and showed me photos of three girls before saying, ‘These are your sisters.’”

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.“

The Lives of Brian: A Memoir (2022)

It’s a treat to read a celebrity memoir that is actually well written, and Johnson, the lead singer of the legendary rock band AC/DC, begins the first chapter of his memoir with a touching memory of his mother.

Even before readers get to the first chapter of Johnson’s memoir, however, they are treated to two other memorable openers. The first appeared in an “Author’s Note,” which began: “Experience is what you get when you don’t get what you want.” The other came from the Prologue: “I’d taken some hard blows before. But this time felt different.”

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.“

The Vegetarian (2007 in Korean; 2016 in English)

Originally published in South Korea as three linked novellas, The Vegetarian came out in English nine years later as a standalone novel. The opening observation from the protagonist's husband hints at some kind of major personal transformation, but we're left wondering: what does it have to do with vegetarianism? The novel was hailed from the first days of publication, and went on to win the 2016 Man Booker International Prize.

The Liar’s Club: A Memoir (1995)

These three paragraphs open the Introduction to Karr’s memoir, and they should be required reading for anyone who believes a short, pithy hook is the best way to begin a book. Karr went on to add in the next paragraph: “Which tells you first off why I chose to write The Liar’s Club as memoir instead of fiction: when fortune hands you such characters, why bother to make stuff up?“

In some cases, it’s difficult to determine what actually constitutes a book’s “opening words.“ After the several-page Introduction, the actual first sentence of Chapter One (“My sharpest memory is of a single instant surrounded by dark”) is followed by a memory from age seven when Karr was being examined by a doctor who “had a long needle hidden behind his back.“ It’s an interesting and well-written beginning, but it doesn’t hold a candle to the opening paragraphs of the Introduction.

Cherry: A Memoir (2000)

Lit: A Memoir (2009)

Karr begins Book Three of her memoirs with a Prologue titled “Open Letter to My Son.“ She continued: “It’s true that—at fifty to your twenty—my brain is dimmer. Your engine of recall is way superior, as you’ve often pointed out.

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.

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.

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.

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.

She Comes First: The Thinking Man’s Guide to Pleasuring a Woman (2004)

It’s hard to imagine a better—or more clever—way to begin a sex manual. This opening sentence may shock the sensibilities of some, but those who are offended are almost certainly not members of the target audience.

In the book, Kerner continued in the first paragraph: “As bestselling author Lou Paget has written, ‘Ask most women, and if they’re being honest, they will admit that what makes them hottest and come hardest is when a man can use his tongue well.’”

I also admired the lovely metaphorical way Kerner began the book’s second paragraph: “But as with any language, in order to express yourself fluently, in order to make your subject sing and soar, you must be thoroughly acquainted with the rules of grammar and style.”

More Myself: A Journey (2020; with Michelle Burford)

This is a lovely, but soft beginning to a high-impact introduction. As the cab drives mother and daughter through the then-seedy 42nd Street neighborhood, seven-year-old Alicia is confused by the sight of scantily-clad women in tight dresses and fishnet stockings standing in the cold, rubbing their hands together to stay warm.

When Alicia asks why these women are standing out in the cold, her mother replies, “When people go through hard times, they often have to do things they don’t want to. Those women are just trying to survive.“ If her mother’s answer had involved information about sex, or pimps, or drugs, it would’ve been too much for a young girl’s mind to grasp—and, it turns out, such words were not necessary.

Keyes concluded her introductory words by writing: “What she does somehow convey is a truth I still carry with me: the women I’ve spotted aren’t on that corner by choice, but by circumstance. Without another word, I slide down into the cracked leather seat and make a silent agreement with myself. I will never be in a situation like that. Vulnerable. Powerless. Exposed.“

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 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.“

The Girl who Loved Tom Gordon (1999)

Lisey’s Story (2006)

The opening line introduces readers to the widow of the famous actor Scott Landon. After two years of struggling with the loss of her husband, she is finally getting around to cleaning out his office. In the process, all kinds of memories come flooding back to her—and, in typical Stephen King fashion, other strange and unusual events also begin to unfold.

In an “Ask Me Anything” session on Reddit in 2013, King was asked which of his novels was his favorite. While he answered that it was Lisey’s Story, you should know he has answered this question differently over the years. The novel was a favorite of many other people as well, winning the 2006 Bram Stoker Award.

“Ayana,” in The Paris Review (Fall 2007); later reprinted in Just After Sunset (2008)

This is a lovely beginning to a story about a man who makes a miraculous recovery from pancreatic cancer after being kissed by a blind, 7-year-old girl named Ayana.

Joyland (2013)

After a so-so start, the opening words of the novel begin to soar when narrator Devin Jones—a college student with a summer job at a North Carolina amusement park—continues: “By early September, Heaven Beach was almost completely deserted, which suited my mood. That fall was the most beautiful of my life. Even forty years later I can say that. And I was never so unhappy, I can say that, too. People think first love is sweet, and never sweeter than when that first bond snaps. You’ve heard a thousand pop and country songs that prove the point; some fool got his heart broke. Yet that first broken heart is always the most painful, the slowest to mend, and leaves the most visible scar. What’s so sweet about that?”

In a 2013 New York Times review, Walter Kim wrote about the protagonist: “Devin, who dreamed of being a novelist but ended up as a writer for magazines, comes across as a version of King himself, which lends his narration a winking, intimate quality.” And Kim went on to write about the book: “King’s ambition this time around isn’t to snatch us and hold us in his grasp but to loft us up high, then briskly set us down the way a Ferris wheel does. Or a first love.”

Later (2021)

The words come from Jamie Conklin, a young boy who is living in Manhattan with single mom Tia, a literary agent. Even though the opening words have a Holden Caulfield feel to them, Jamie is not an ordinary boy. Since birth, he has possessed a special ability to communicate with dead people.

In the opening paragraph, Jamie continued: “It’s about a certain word I keep using. I learned a lot of four-letter words from my mother and used them from an early age (as you will soon find out), but this is one with five letters. The word is later, as in “Later on” and “Later I found out” and “It was only later that I realized.”

Survivor (1998)

When most people think of a thriller penned by an author named King, they quite naturally think of Stephen. But there’s another writer in the family as well, and, while not nearly as prolific as her better-known husband, Tabita King has produced seven novels, several non-fiction works, a few volumes of poetry, and scores of short stories.

In Survivor, she begins with a terrifying scene many of us have personally experienced—children darting out from the shadows and suddenly caught in the headlights of a vehicle we’re driving. In the opening paragraph, the narrator continued:

“She was above them behind the wheel of her Blazer, and as the girls lurched in her lights, the hilarity distorting their faces turned to terror, their arms upthrust as if against the glare. She was by then standing on her brakes. The Blazer shuddered and bucked, tires shrieking. Only inches from her bumper, the two girls seemed to reel as if in a strong wind.”

The Bean Trees (1988)

These are the fantastical opening words of Kingsolver’s career-launching debut novel. They also clearly establish the “voice” of the novel’s narrator and protagonist, a feisty young Kentucky woman named Marietta Greer (who changes her name to Taylor as she embarks on a westward adventure in her 1955 Volkswagen bug).

Men: Notes From an Ongoing Investigation (2014)

Kipnis continued: “A daddy’s girl who grew into a wayward woman, I wasn’t that surprised to find, when I started rummaging around in the essays and criticism I’d written over the last fifteen or so years, that it wasn’t the random, unsystematic tangle I’d recalled; instead a lot of it seemed to cluster around the subject of…men.” [ellipsis in original]

The Festival of Insignificance (2013)

When they are beautifully crafted, sexually suggestive opening words—even if only slightly suggestive—are pretty much guaranteed to elicit a reader’s interest, and that is certainly true with this opener. As the narrator continued, our interest is only deepened:

“He was captivated; captivated and even disturbed: It was as if their seductive power no longer resided in their thighs, their buttocks, or their breasts, but in that small round hole located in the center of the body.”

A 2013 Booklist review hailed the novel as “classic Kundera: polyphonic, digressive, intellectual yet anti-philosophical deliberately strange, and aggressively light. And his descriptions are as beautiful as ever.”

An Extraordinary Theory of Objects: A Memoir of an Outsider in Paris (2012)

Of all the ways a writer could choose to describe herself at the beginning of a memoir, this is an unusual, but extremely effective choice—and it only gets better as the opening paragraph unfolds:

“Born with red hair to parents without it, I always thought I was a changeling—swapped at birth because some perfect couple knew they didn’t want me, even before I could talk, before I could tell them they were right.”

Immediately, we form the impression of someone who, from her earliest days, felt like an outsider looking at an alien and unwelcoming world. In a 2013 review in Black Warrior Review, Ethel Rohan singled out LaCava’s first sentence for comment, and wrote: “What follows in this brief but gripping memoir is the chronicling of her desire, separateness, depression, loneliness, and her inability to feel settled in the world and within herself.”

Nobody is Ever Missing (2014)

This is a sad opening line, true, but it also provides a revealing glimpse into the interior world of an unhappily married woman. The narrator and protagonist, 28-year-old Elyria Marcus, continued:

“I knew I needed to tell him this but I couldn’t imagine any possible way to get my mouth to make those words, and since my husband can unintentionally read minds, he drank a great deal more than usual that week, jars of gin mostly, but tall beers from the deli, too. He’d walk in sipping a can hidden in a paper bag, smile like it was a joke.

“I would laugh.

“He would laugh.

“Inside our laughing we weren’t really laughing.“

The Answers (2017)

When readers open a book and dip into a superbly-crafted opening paragraph like this, very few appreciate how the writer got to the final result. In a 2017 Guardian article on the best “Opening Scenes” in books, Lacey took a moment to reveal the painstaking process behind this great opener:

“I worked and reworked, un-worked and reworked the first chapter of my second novel, The Answers, trying to get the tone just right. It began as 12 pages, a braid of the main character’s memories and anxieties, then whittled down to 10, then eight, then five. For a year, I thought that five-page opening was perfect. Then, in a rare late-night revision fit, I deleted it and replaced the whole thing with a single paragraph. Now it wastes no time in opening the book with the right feeling—a mix of regret and menace and mystery.”

The Answers was widely praised by critics, and one reviewer who especially appreciated her paring-down efforts was Claire Fallon, who wrote in a Huffington Post review: “Lacey’s prose radiates elegance beneath its unassuming, unflashy surface; there’s nary a maladroit word or an unrevealing detail.“

The Other Americans (2019)

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.”

In the opening paragraph, narrator and protagonist Nora Guerraoui, a jazz composer of Moroccan descent, continued: “Whenever I think about that moment, these two contradictory images come to me: my father struggling for breath on the cracked asphalt, and me drinking champagne with my roommate, Margo.”

I Know This Much Is True (2008)

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

“The first part of this sentence points to an average man on an average day. The second part indicates something huge is about to happen. Thomas is no average character. Who chooses a library to make a sacrifice? Reading it today, one might suspect Thomas to be a suicide bomber, but in 1998, when I first read it, that didn’t enter my mind. Even if it had, I would have been wrong. What sacrifice is about to be made? Why the library? What’s going on between Thomas and his twin brother?”

In 2020, the novel was adapted into an HBO-TV miniseries, with Mark Ruffalo playing the roles of both twin brothers, Dominick and Thomas Birdsey.

Hard Laughter (1979)

Any mention of an American castle is certain to arouse interest, but especially when the opening sentence is so crisply and cleanly written. In Lamott’s debut novel, inspired by her own father’s battle with brain cancer, the narrator is a 23-year-old writer and part-time housecleaner named Jennifer. She continued: “It was a monstrous rock construction two hundred feet above San Francisco Bay, surrounded by cypress trees, two stories of rock with a trapdoor underneath the kitchen table and two caves in the back of the house, one of which was said to have led to the beach during bootlegging days.“

All New People (1989)

I fell in love with this line when I first read it more than two decades ago—and was delighted to recently discover what writer Richard Bausch said about it in a 1989 New York Times book review: “Anne Lamott’s wonderful little novel is gripping not because it possesses any of the usual qualities of suspense or dramatic tension, but because its strong, clear, self-deprecating and witty voice takes immediate hold and refuses to let go. I find it hard to imagine that anyone’s critical faculties could withstand the unconventional charm of the very first line.”

Blue Shoes (2002)

The narrator continued: “Those trees were one reason she’d moved back into her parents’ old room after leaving Nicholas, those trees and the sloping grassy hillside behind the house.”

In a 2008 Writer’s Digest article (“The Big Grab”), writer James Scott Bell emphasized the importance of creating a sense of intrigue in a novel’s first lines. About these opening words, he wrote: “In this example, Lamott starts with description. But she gets a character into the mix by the third sentence. And then she drops in a line indicating something amiss—her husband isn’t where he should be. We have a feeling of unease. Mattie is in the midst of a troubling situation and is going to have to do something about it.”

Imperfect Birds (2010)

In the second paragraph, the narrator grimly continued: “Elizabeth Ferguson looked around at the Saturday-morning comings and goings of townspeople, and saw parents who had lost or were losing their kids, kids who had lost or were losing their minds.“

Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928)

Lawrence’s classic novel begins with a sweeping oxymoronic generalization about the efforts of people trying to make some kind of sense out of the incomprehensible realities of WWI, then commonly referred to as “The Great War” or “The war to end all wars.“ In the novel’s opening paragraph, the narrator continued with some insights about how people were coping with the challenge:

“The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.”

In the novel’s second paragraph, the narrator abandoned the grand perspective of the first sentence and moved directly into the mind of the title character: “This was more or less Constance Chatterley’s position. The war had brought the roof down over her head. And she had realized that one must live and learn.”

Let’s Pretend This Never Happened: (A Mostly True Memoir) (2012)

These are the opening words of the Introduction to the book. In the first chapter, titled “I Was a Three-Year-Old Arsonist,” Lawson also began memorably:

“Call me Ishmael. I won’t answer to it, because it’s not my name, but it’s much more agreeable than most of the things I’ve been called. Call me ‘that-weird-chick-who-says-fuck-a lot’ is probably more accurate. But ‘Ishmael’ seems classier, and it makes a way more respectable beginning than the sentence I’d originally written, which was about how I’d just run into my gynecologist at Starbucks and she totally looked right past me like she didn’t even know me. And so I stood there wondering whether that’s something she does on purpose to make her clients feel less uncomfortable, or whether she just genuinely didn’t recognize me without my vagina.”

Day-by-Day and Heart-to-Heart (2021)

By beginning her book with a delightful bit of ironic phrasing, Lazar immediately communicates an important message: this memoir will be far more than a simple recounting of events and experiences.

Squeeze Play (1990)

There’s only one word to describe an opener like this: a classic “hook.“ The words come from A. B. Berkowitz, a female Washington Tribune sportswriter who’s been assigned to cover the Washington Senators, the worst team in major league baseball. In the novel’s first paragraph, Berkowitz continued:

“Professionally speaking, they have a lot in common, which is to say they are all attached to guys, most of whom are naked while I am not, thus forming the odd dynamic of our relationship. They are athletes who believe in the inalienable right to scratch their balls anytime they want. I am a sportswriter. My job is to tell you the score.”

An autobiographical novel inspired by Leavy’s own sportswriting career with the Washington Post, the novel was described by Allen Barra in an Entertainment Weekly review as “the funniest, raunchiest, and most compassionate baseball novel I’ve ever read.” Barra went on to add that the novel “is sure to offend some people who cried during Field of Dreams—and that’s good enough for me.”

The Cunning Linguist: Ribald Riddles, Lascivious Limericks, Carnal Corn, and Other Good, Clean Dirty Fun (2003)

Lederer continued by having the teacher say: “Correct. Now Mary, I want to tell you three things. First, you didn’t do your homework last night. Second, you have a dirty mind. And third, when you grow up, you’re going to be dreadfully disappointed.”

If we were to apply the Motion Picture Association of America’s film ratings system to Lederer’s more than fifty books, all but this one would probably be G-Rated. The Cunning Linguist probably deserves a PG Rating—not just for the occasionally raunchy content, but also for the punning title (if you can’t figure it out on your own, ask a more worldly friend).

To Kill a Mockingbird (1961)

The narrator is Jem’s younger sister “Scout,“ the daughter of Alabama country lawyer Atticus Finch (her mother died when she was a baby).

In the next paragraph, Scout introduced the character Dill (based on Harper Lee’s childhood friend, Truman Capote): “When enough years had gone by to enable us to look back on them, we sometimes discussed the events leading to his accident. I maintain that the Ewells started it all, but Jem, who was four years my senior, said it started long before that. He said it began the summer Dill came to us, when Dill first gave us the idea of making Boo Radley come out.“

The novel won the 1961 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, but it went on to be regarded as a cultural treasure after the 1962 film adaptation, featuring an Oscar-winning performance by Gregory Peck. In 2003, the American Film Institute hailed Atticus Finch as the greatest movie hero of the 20th century.

The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue (2017)

“Until Gwen,” in The Atlantic (June 2004)

In a 2005 Boston Globe article, Bella English revealed that Lehane “had this opening sentence kicking around in his head for eight years, but no place to put it.” She continued: “He couldn’t for the life of him find the right vehicle for it; it just didn’t fit into anything he was working on. Then he was asked to write a short story for an anthology, with one requirement: It had to have something to do with fathers and sons.”

In a 2014 article in the Hunger Mountain Review (“7 Ways to Seduce Your Reader”), writer and editor Miciah Bay Gault hailed this as an “all-time favorite” and cleverly described it as “a speed-date of a first line.” She added: “In one sentence we learn about the narrator’s crappy childhood, crappy present life, criminal background, and criminal father. We get a sense of the characters’ relative ages and a bit of the setting. In this line we understand that daddy is perfectly willing to put his son in jeopardy. Because the narrator has chosen to let us in on that fact, we sympathize with a potentially unsympathetic protagonist and we believe he wants to go straight. Wow. That’s a lot to pack into one line, a powerful first sentence that seduced me into reading more.”

After his spectacular opening sentence, Lehane continued in an equally enjoyable way:

“Two minutes into the ride, the prison still hanging tilted in the rearview, Mandy tells you that she only hooks part-time. The rest of the time she does light secretarial for an independent video chain and tends bar, two Sundays a month, at the local VFW. But she feels her calling—her true calling in life—is to write.

“You go, ‘Books?’

“’Books.’ She snorts, half out of amusement, half to shoot a line off your fist and up her left nostril. ‘Screenplays!’ She shouts it at the dome light for some reason. ‘You know—movies.’”

The Good Girl’s Guide to Rakes (2022)

I’m a sucker for a good oxymoronic opening, and this one—suggesting that a couple could be so ill-suited to each other that their upcoming marriage could be described as a disaster even before it began—was nothing short of brilliant. In the novel’s second paragraph, the narrator continued:

“Kieran Ransome and his family stood beneath the portico of St. George’s before entering the church’s vestibule, and as his mother briefly lifted his sister’s veil to brush away a stray lock of hair, he caught a glimpse of Willa’s face. Her cheeks were ashen, her lips drawn into a thin, tight slash. The countess twittered and fussed with Willa’s gown, yet his sister barely uttered a word.”

Luster (2020)

In a 2021 World Book History blog post, English writer Jack McKeever wrote: “As far as first sentences go, Raven Leilani’s debut novel Luster lands on an absolute gold mine.”

The tantalizing first sentence is made intentionally ambiguous because of the “fully clothed” and “at our desks” phrases, but once we deduce that the narrator is referring to computer sex, we’re along for the ride. The opening words come from a woman known only as Edie. A 23-year-old editorial assistant in a Manhattan publishing house, she continues in the opening paragraph:

“He is uptown processing a new bundle of microfiche and I am downtown handling corrections for a new Labrador detective manuscript. He tells me what he ate for lunch and asks if I can manage to take off my underwear in my cubicle without anyone noticing.”

“The Tonto Woman” (1982); reprinted in The Tonto Woman and Other Western Stories (1998)

Vega continued in the opening paragraph: “Since then I have fornicated with many women, maybe eight hundred. No, not that many, considering my work. Maybe six hundred only.” And the priest would say, “Do you mean bad women or good women?” And Ruben Vega would say, “They are all good, Father.”

Where the Heart Is (1995)

In a 2018 post, the editors of Stylist.com included this in their compilation of “The Best 100 Opening Lines From Books.“ Yes, it’s a terrific beginning, but things only got better over the next three paragraphs:

“For most people, sevens were lucky. But not for her. She’d had a bad history with them, starting with her seventh birthday, the day Momma Nell ran away with a baseball umpire named Fred. Then, when Novalee was in the seventh grade, her only friend, Rhonda Talley, stole an ice cream truck for her boyfriend and got sent to the Tennessee State School for Girls in Tullahoma.

“By then, Novalee knew there was something screwy about sevens, so she tried to stay clear of them. But sometimes, she thought, you just can’t see a thing coming at you.

“And that’s how she got stabbed. She just didn’t see it coming.“

Letts’s novel debuted to sluggish sales and lukewarm reviews (one critic called it a “lightweight story with a fair amount of charm”), but three years later it became a New York Times bestseller after Oprah Winfrey selected it for her Book Club (it was later adapted into a 2000 film starring Natalie Portman and Ashley Judd).

Made in the U.S.A. (2009)

Few modern writers have been better than Letts in capturing the world of adolescent females. The narrator continued in the next paragraph: “She was almost pretty but still had the not quite finished look of a teenager—unlined skin dappled with sand-colored freckles, cheeks not quite shed of baby fat, frizzy hair too wild to be tamed by gel or hair spray. Her hips were as narrow as a boy’s, and her feet looked too big for her tiny ankles and spindly legs.”

And in the third paragraph, she added: “But worst of all, she was convinced—not for the first time that day—that her breasts were never going to grow beyond the two walnut-size bumps on her chest. The best she could hope for was a Wonderbra, but she doubted even that would perform the miracle she needed.”

Invisible Woman (2024)

The novel’s opening words are a masterclass in a microcosm. Beginning with the first time the thought came to her, Lief arouses the reader’s curiosity and plants an important seed. Then, after a brief—but quite lovely—description of mundane dishwashing details, she drops the hammer.

About the book, Jennifer Hillier (Things We Do in the Dark) wrote: “From the first page to the last, Katia Lief’s Invisible Woman will seize you and never let go.” I will almost certainly be featuring the opening words of this taut literary thriller in my end-of-year compilation of “The 24 Best Opening Lines of 2024.”

In the book, the narrator—a former pioneering filmmaker who has morphed into a middle-aged wife and mother—continued:

“The thought arrived whole, like a package delivered to her door. It shocked her and she slammed the door but eventually she cracked it open to take another look.”

“Game of Crones,” in Longreads.com (May 2019)

Lippmann, fifty years old when she and her husband adopted a baby girl, found an intriguing way to introduce her essay on the topic of older mothers. She was invited to write the piece for the Longreads.com “Fine Lines” series.

Priestdaddy: A Memoir (2017)

Priestdaddy was one of the most acclaimed memoirs of 2017, an extraordinary recounting of Lockwood’s experiences as the daughter of a Lutheran minister who became a highly unconventional Catholic priest. It also had what I regard as the best opening line of the year in the world of non-fiction—a perfect signal to readers that this would be a memoir with both wit and edge.

In a New York Times review, Dwight Garner was clearly thinking about Lockwood’s opening salvo when he wrote that the book “roars from the start.” Priestdaddy went on to win the 2018 Thurber Prize for American Humor. And in 2019, The New York Times included it on its list of “The 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years.“

“The Restraints,” in James Thomas, et. al., Flash Fiction: Very Short Stories (1992)

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 in particular, he wrote:

“Wow. Who wouldn’t want to read further to learn more about such a character and to find out what her relationship with her father was? Her hunger wasn’t important to him; her dancing was. I’d like to know about a character like this. Wouldn’t you?”

“Willy,” in Getting Personal: Selected Essays (2003)

We’re used to seeing the phrase, “My wife was seeing another man,” but to see it applied to mothers is fresh and unexpected. It’s also a helpful reminder than an affair does not merely involve a husband and a wife, but sometimes an entire family.

In the opening paragraph, Lopate continued: “It may have been childish confusion—I was eight years old at the time—or a trick memory plays on us, but I seem to remember the Jeep he drove was also a Willys. This car has disappeared from modern life. I am unable even to picture it. But at the time it colored all my thinking about the affair.”

“Samson and Delilah and the Kids,” in Getting Personal: Selected Essays (2003)

If you’re anything like me, your first reaction to this opening line is probably something along the lines of: “The era of the great Jewish lovers? When was that?”

Lopate clearly anticipated that reaction, and continued: “Samson and Delilah, David and Bathsheba, Solomon and Sheba were burning up screens across the land. I never managed to see David and Bathsheba (though I know the coming attractions by heart), because the movie industry in its wisdom decreed that I was too young for this adulterous tale. Inconsistently, they let me into Samson and Delilah when I was seven.”

The Fat Lady Sings (2011)

One key goal of an opening line is to establish the “voice” of the protagonist, and Lovett does that nicely in his first YA novel. The words come from Aggie Stockdale, a high school senior with dreams of starring in her high school’s production of “Hello Dolly.” It’s her favorite play, she memorized the lines at age ten, and she believes she is perfect for the role. The problem, though, is that Aggie is the fattest girl in her class, so we already know how that part of the story ends (it’s how she responds to the rejection that makes things interesting). In the opening paragraph, she continued:

“I’m not saying they’re not gorgeous—who could miss that fact when she’s wearing a top cut so low it’s a wonder her naval ring doesn’t get caught in the neckline. Whoever her plastic surgeon is does great work. But they’re still fake. How do I know? How can anybody not know. Little Miss A-cup is ‘out sick’ for a week after her eighteenth and when she comes back she’s busting out all over. What was she sick with? Boob mumps?”

The Bringer of Happiness (2022)

All My Mother’s Lovers (2020)

Having never experienced even one lazy orgasm, I’m not sure I’m familiar with the concept, but the opening words describe Maggie Krause, a 27-year-old gay woman who is in the middle of being pleasured by her girlfriend Lucia when her brother calls. Things get even more sexually explicit as the opening scene unfolds:

“‘Don’t pick up,’ Lucia says, the lower half of her face glistening. But Maggie doesn’t listen; she lives for moments like this.

“‘Hello, Brother. I am currently being eaten out. What are you up to?’ And when Lucia pulls her face away, peeved, Maggie leans up on her elbows and says, ‘No, don’t stop.’”

In a 2021 blog post, book editors at Amazon.com included this in their compilation of “10 of the Best Opening lines from the Past Decade.” About the book, editor Al Woodworth wrote: “As you might surmise from the opening line, this is a novel about sexuality, falling in love, familial relationships, and loss.”

Michael Tolliver Lives [Book 7 in the Tales of the City Series] (2007)

Sometimes, an opening sentence works simply because of a phrase or small snippet—and for me, the idea of a loaded glance pulled me directly into the story.

To be honest, serendipity also played a significant role in piquing my interest, for only a few weeks prior to picking up the book, I had stumbled on a remarkable new (to me) observation by Ralph Waldo Emerson. In his “Behavior” essay in The Conduct of Life (1860), Emerson wrote: “The glance is natural magic. The mysterious communication established across a house between two entire strangers, moves all the springs of wonder.”

So, with all this in the back of my mind, I returned with a heightened interest to the novel’s opening paragraph. The narrator, a middle-aged gay man named Mike Tolliver, continued: “He was close to my age, I guess, not that far past fifty—and not bad-looking either, in a beat-up Bruce Willis-y sort of way—so I waited a moment before turning to see if he would go for a second look. He knew this old do-si-do as well as I did, and hit his mark perfectly.”

Love and Will (1989)

The Road (2006)

GUEST COMMENTARY from Dr. Peter Olsson, a New Hampshire psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, who writes: “In the opening words of a novel that went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, McCarthy sets the mood in dark, cold, and starkly crafted sentences that plunge the reader directly into a post-apocalyptic America. In the opening paragraph, the narrator added”:

“His hand rose and fell softly with each precious breath. He pushed away the plastic tarpaulin and raised himself in the stinking robes and blankets and looked toward the east for any light but there was none.”

Dr. Olsson continued: “In a searing novel described by Dennis Lehane as ’the definitive vision of the world after nuclear war,’ a desperate and passionately protective father travels with his beloved young son down a perilous, decimated terrain toward a distant ocean beach that serves as a fragile symbol of hope. In their journey, they face terrifying encounters with people rendered subhuman by hunger and depraved environmental conditions. McCarthy is a master of probing, dark, penetrating language that explores the truth of authentic emotional questions through his wordcraft.“ See the opening line of Olsson’s 2019 memoir Janusian Days here.

The Passenger (2022)

It’s a grisly opening scene, but with a stunning juxtaposition of antithetical elements—and, after one sentence, we’re already along for the ride. The novel’s first sentence is also proof positive that, at age eighty-nine, McCarthy is still at the top of his game. The legendary American author has written many great opening lines in his career, and this may be his best. I was delighted to honor it 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:

“One of her yellow boots had fallen off and stood in the snow beneath her. The shape of her coat lay dusted in the snow where she’d dropped it and she wore only a white dress and she hung among the bare gray poles of the winter trees with her head bowed and her hands turned slightly outward like those certain ecumenical statues whose attitude asks that their history be considered.”

Angela’s Ashes: A Memoir (1996)

In his memoir, McCourt continued: “When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I survived at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.”

McCourt’s memoir was one of the most acclaimed books of the year, winning the 1996 National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography and the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for Autobiography.

The Hero of This Book: A Novel (2022)

The opening line has an ominous, telegraphic quality, suggesting that a world-shattering event has happened, and changed everything. Whatever else we read will be seen through that lens, making it an enormously effective first sentence. In the opening paragraph, the narrator continued:

“We thought it was pretty bad, though in retrospect there was joy to be found. Aboveground monsters were everywhere, with terrible hair and red neckties. The monsters weren’t in control of their powers—the hate crimes, mass shootings, heat waves, stupidity, certainty, flash floods, wildfires—but they had reach. Everyone talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it. Turns out we were supposed to.”

Even though the book is described as a novel, it’s also a memoir, a eulogy, an exploration of grieving and loss, a writing and storytelling guidebook, and more. About the book, Kirkus Reviews enthused: “Braided into McCracken’s gorgeously spiraling narrative is an expansive meditation on the act of writing and, intriguingly, the art of writing memoir...the novel assumes a hybrid quality that could be called autofiction but really is an homage to the art of great storytelling. Novel? Memoir? Who cares. It’s a great story, beautifully told.”

Brewster’s Millions (1902)

McCutcheon has been almost completely forgotten by modern readers, but he was very popular in the early decades of the 20th century (of his 42 novels, 25 were made into silent films). Brewster’s Millions (1902) was his most enduring work, adapted into a successful 1906 stage play, and then into a number of films over the rest of the century (including a most enjoyable 1985 version starring Richard Pryor).

A Fool and His Money (1913)

I was immediately engaged when I first came upon this line, thinking to myself, “I don’t know for sure, but if one of my uncles said I was a fool, I’m pretty sure I would remember which one he was.“

The narrator continued in a way that further engaged me: “If memory serves me well he relieved himself of that conviction in the presence of my mother— whose brother he was— at a time when I was least competent to acknowledge his wisdom and most arrogant in asserting my own. I was a freshman in college: a fact—or condition perhaps— which should serve as an excuse for both of us.

The Housemaid (2022)

These arresting opening words come from Millie Calloway, a young New York woman who has recently lost her job and is now living out of her car. When she is offered a job as a housekeeper for a wealthy Long Island couple, she quickly accepts, ignoring a few queasy feelings she has formed about the conditions of her employment—principally that of having to sleep in a small attic bedroom with a lock on the outside.

In the novel’s second paragraph, Millie continued: “I should have run for it while I had the chance. Now my shot is gone. Now that the police officers are in the house and they’ve discovered what’s upstairs, there’s no turning back.”

The Housemaid’s Secret (2023)

The novel opens with this captivating first sentence, and is immediately followed by equally enticing words:

“Lightning flashes around me, illuminating the living room of the small cabin where I’m spending the night, and where my life will soon reach an abrupt end.”

The provocative opening words come from protagonist Millie Calloway, a young New York woman we first met in McFadden’s 2022 bestseller The Housemaid. In this sequel, she takes yet another job as a housemaid, this time for a wealthy couple with secrets to hide. The novel won the Goodreads Choice Award for The Best Mystery/Thriller of 2023.

“An Old Man Who Liked to Fish,” in Cloudbursts: Collected and New Stories (2018)

The narrator continued: “Since I live with reckless inattention to what I eat, I watched with fascination as they set out apples, cheese, red wine and the kind of artisanal bread that looks like something found in the road. The Smiths were the last friends of my parents still alive. And to the degree we spend our lives trying to understand our parents, I always looked to Edward and Diana’s visits as a pleasant forensic exercise.”

In a New York Times review, Justin Taylor wrote: “There’s so much to praise and parse here that I hardly know where to begin. How about the way that the light visual comedy of the bread is juxtaposed with the cerebral, astringent humor of the phrase “pleasant forensic exercise”? How about the shift, over four sinuous sentences, from detachment to intimacy, as the narrator reveals his relationship to the Smiths?”

“Balloons,” in The New Yorker (May 10, 2021)

Opening paragraphs don’t get much better, and the concluding portion about a yearly inspection of the marriage is one of the best things ever written on the subject. McGuane was eighty-one when the short story was published, and I was delighted to see an old master still functioning at the top of his game.

The narrator, we shortly discover, is a local physician who is having an affair with Joan. He continued: “Roger always saluted his father-in-law’s departure with the words ‘Good riddance.’ In those days, Joan stirred up our town with her air of dangerous glamour and the sense that her marriage to Roger couldn’t possibly last.”

Brightness Falls (1992)

This is a magnificent opening sentence, perfectly capturing how folks in the 1990s recovery world viewed their lives—with addicts and depressives playing baseball as natural and matter-of-fact as the Red Sox and Yankees. The opening words begin a kind of prologue to the novel, although it is not formally titled as such, and the unnamed narrator continued with an impressive display of writing talent:

“The quality of play was erratic, the recovering addicts being depressed from lack of their chosen medications and the depressives heavily dosed with exotic chemical bullets aimed at their elusive despair. Being myself among the clinically numb, I don’t remember the outcome of the game now, though I submit that taken together we were as representative a group as you could hope to field at that juncture in history. It was the fall of 1987.”

The Secret Lives of Dresses (2011)

The opening sentence describes Dora Winston, a college student who is clearly upset. It takes a second to sink in, but the intriguing placement of the terms upshift and downshift cleverly suggests she is crying and driving at the same time. As the first paragraph continues, the narrator also continues to meld the emotional and automotive elements:

“That had been the order of things for the past two hours. The first two hours had been pure howling, crying so hard she almost couldn’t see, but then it had slowed down, a torrent turning into a spitting rain. Still bad weather, but not impassable.”

McKean, the former editor of The New Oxford American Dictionary and founder of Wordnik.com, is one of the world’s foremost lexicographers. In The Secret Lives of Dresses, her debut novel, she proves she can also craft a great opening paragraph. The novel grew out of one of McKean’s other passions: fashion (which she has explored since 2003 in “A Dress a Day” blog, posted out of the website: Dressaday.com).

Waiting to Exhale (1992)

The Interruption of Everything (2005)

Few writers are better than McMillan at immediately establishing “the voice” of their protagonists, and this captivating opening line comes from 44-year-old Marilyn Grimes, an unhappily-married mother of three college-age children. Overweight, unsettled, and increasingly distraught over the way her life has turned out, she appears on the cusp of a major mid-life crisis. In the opening paragraph, she continued:

“My break is just fifteen minutes long and I’m trying to decide with the help of a book on the subject of “the change” if Paulette was really on to something when she suggested I get a blood test to see if my hormone levels were diminishing. And if it turns out to be true, I might want to get them replenished with something besides the Good & Plenty I’ve been eating by the handful for the last seven or eight months and I don’t even like licorice.”

Terms of Endearment (1975)

Sin Killer [Book 1 of the Berrybender Narratives] (2002)

Peyton Place (1956)

These are the opening words of a novel that quickly became the publishing sensation of 1956, selling 100,000 copies within the first ten days of publication (it was on the New York Times Bestseller List for 59 consecutive weeks). It went on to sell more than 12 million copies and is one of a limited number of books to become deeply embedded in American pop culture. To illustrate, whenever people share dark and sordid secrets—especially of a sexual nature—about their family or work life, there’s a good chance they’ll conclude by saying something like, “Welcome to Peyton Place!”

In 2014, the editors of The American Scholar included the first sentence of Peyton Place in their list of “The Ten Worst Opening Lines.” They began their compilation by writing: “We’ve all noticed them: first sentences of a novel, either overwrought or just plain embarrassing, that elicit a groan or a smack of the forehead. Here are 10 opening doozies, lines that make it difficult to continue reading.”

With respect, I would disagree. The opening paragraph has a sensual, almost erotic quality that nicely foreshadows much of what is to come in the novel. In a New York Times review, Carlos Baker, a Princeton professor and noted Hemingway scholar, wasn’t wild about the book, but conceded that Metalious was “a pretty fair writer for a first novelist.”

Twilight (2005)

In a 2016 article in The Guardian, Ciara Murphy wrote: “Love it or hate it, Twilight has what I consider to be one of the best opening lines in YA fiction. We’re immediately thrust into the action, with a whole backstory to catch up on and a heroine who (assuming she’s going to narrate the entire book) needs to execute an escape Houdini would be proud of. This is what I call a hook.”

The opening words come from a teenage girl named Bella Swan, who continues: “I stared across the long room, into the dark eyes of the hunter, and she looked pleasantly back at me.” And in the next paragraph, Bella added: “At least it was a good way to die, in the place of someone else, someone I loved. Noble, even. That ought to count for something.”

New Moon [Book 2 of The Twilight Saga] (2006)

Eclipse [Book 3 of The Twilight Saga] (2007)

The Silent Patient (2019)

This is the entire first paragraph of Chapter One. In the second, the narrator continued: “They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel a well-known fashion photographer.”

The dramatic opening sentence doesn’t come out of the blue, however. The book’s Prologue hauntingly begins with a lengthy entry Alicia has made in a book with blank pages that her husband has given her.

After titling it “Alicia Berenson’s Diary,” she begins: “I don’t know why I’m writing this. That’s not true. Maybe I do know and just don’t want to admit it to myself. I don’t even know what to call it—this thing I’m writing. It feels a little pretentious to call it a diary. It’s not like I have anything to say.”

As Alicia continues, it is clear she is struggling with depression, a matter so concerning to her husband that he believes it will be helpful for her to record her thoughts in a diary. Her first entry has some foreboding elements, but she ends it by writing: “This is going to be a joyful record of ideas and images that inspire me artistically, things that make a creative impact on me. I’m only going to write positive, happy, normal thoughts. No crazy thoughts allowed.”

“How to Build a Pedestal,” in The Spokesman-Review [Spokane, Washington] (Feb. 22, 2024)

When writers ask me, “What’s the best way to begin my book (or article, or essay), I have a stock answer: “Write something brilliant, if you can. That’s the only sure-fire way to ensure that readers will continue reading.” Happily, I did not have to give that advice to Midstokke, for she apparently already knew the answer. I will almost certainly be featuring the opening words of her column in my end-of-year compilation of the best opening lines of 2024.

In the article, Midstokke was talking about the critical importance of compliments, praise, acknowledgments, and other affirmations of our personal worth. She went on to write later in the column:

“Which brings me to the importance of the pedestal. I am told they are topple-tippy things, a precarious risk to be stood upon. Once placed up there, the only place we can go is down. I disagree. We should be put on pedestals all the time, preferably for the most mundane things. I know this because my husband has healed a thousands wounds of my inner child by doing just that. He literally told me he was proud of me for taking a nap the other day. This is brilliant because I’m really good at taking naps. What I’m learning is that it is often these nearly microscopic acknowledgments, the tiny affirmations of our choices, the nods of empathy when we wrestle with our mistakes, that give us our sense of place, belonging, worth.”

Tropic of Cancer (1934)

In Your First Page (2019), writer and writing teacher Peter Selgin called this an “iconoclastic” opening. He went on to add: “‘We are alone here and we are dead’ is still one heckuva way to begin a novel. Imagine how it must have struck people in 1934. Whether one admires Henry Miller’s convictions or not, he had the courage of them.”

Tropic of Capricorn (1939)

Sexus (1949)

In this deeply autobiographical novel, the unnamed narrator is an unhappily married man who is smitten by a dance hall girl. He continued: “The day passed like a dream. After dinner I fell asleep on the couch and awoke fully dressed about six the next morning. I felt thoroughly refreshed, pure at heart, and obsessed with one idea—to have her at any cost.”

Plexus (1953)

The Distinguished Guest (1995)

This is the opening sentence of a novel about a writer who achieves fame fairly late in life—and just before she begins to sense the steep decline that awaits as a result of her newly-diagnosed Parkinson’s Disease.

Everyday Enlightenment: The Twelve Gateways to Personal Growth (1998)

Beginning a non-fiction work with an important self-revelation is almost always a good idea, but it works especially well in a book inviting readers on a journey of personal discovery. The impact of Millman’s first sentence was further enhanced by the exceptional candor—and, in my view, the emotional courage—he showed as he continued in the opening paragraph:

“We had been married for six years and were living in a cottage at Stanford University where we served as dormitory directors. My wife had become enamored of a handsome tennis player. When he entered our cottage to speak with her, as students did on occasion, her eyes sparkled as they no longer sparkled for me. They spoke and laughed into the night, lost in conversation.”

The Bone Clocks (2014)

The opening words come from 15-year-old Holly Sykes, who is wildly infatuated with a 24-year-old man named Vinny. In the opening paragraph, Holly continued: “Last night, the words just said themselves, ‘Christ, I really love you, Vin.’ and Vinny puffed out a cloud of smoke and did this Prince Charles voice, ‘One must say, one’s frightfully partial to spending time with you too, Holly Sykes,’ and I nearly weed myself laughing.”

In a New York Times review, Michiko Kakutani described the novel as “Dazzling,” adding “Mitchell’s heavy arsenal of talents is showcased in these pages: his symphonic imagination; his ventriloquist’s ability to channel the voices of myriad characters from different time zones and cultures; his intuitive understanding of children and knack for capturing their solemnity and humor; and his ear for language—its rhythms, sounds and inflections.”

Gone With the Wind (1936)

In a 2011 blog post, English writer Kit Whitfield wrote: “So begins Gone With The Wind, that dizzying whirlwind of romance, false history, social Darwinism, compelling character drama and stomach-turning racism that has, since its publication, captivated readers....“

Despite the problems enumerated by Whitfield, the novel won the 1937 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. It also gave readers one of the most unforgettable female characters in the history of literature, brought to life in an equally unforgettable way by Vivian Leigh in David O. Selznick’s 1939 film adaptation.

In the novel, the narrator continued about Scarlett: “In her face were too sharply blended the delicate features of her mother, a Coast aristocrat of French descent, and the heavy ones of her florid Irish father. But it was an arresting face, pointed of chin, square of jaw. Her eyes were pale green without a touch of hazel, starred with bristly black lashes and slightly tilted at the ends. Above them, her thick black brows slanted upward, cutting a startling oblique line in her magnolia-white skin—that skin so prized by Southern women and so carefully guarded with bonnets, veils and mittens against hot Georgia suns.“

The Pursuit of Love (1945)

This opening paragraph begins softly, slowly gathers momentum, and, at its conclusion, packs an enormous punch. The novel was the first in a trilogy about the Radlett’s, an upper-class English family modeled after the author’s own notoriously unconventional kin. A critical as well as a commercial success, the novel firmly established Mitford’s reputation as one of the era’s most popular novelists.

The Naked Ape: A Zoologist’s Study of the Human Animal (1967)

Morris, a zoologist and former curator of mammals at the London Zoo, said his purpose in writing the book was to examine human beings in the same way that members of his profession had previously studied animals. In his opening words, he continued: “This unusual and highly successful species spends a great deal of time examining his higher motives and an equal amount of time studiously ignoring his fundamental ones.”

Shortly after publication, the book became an international bestseller, translated into more than two dozen languages. Part of the book’s popularity came from Morris’s clear and often captivating prose—as seen in his opening words. But it is also clear that many readers were attracted by the book’s titillating details, including Morris’s assertion that, compared to other mammals, male human beings had the highest ratio of penis size to body mass (it was for this and a few other reasons that Morris described human beings as “the sexiest primate alive”).

After Dark (2004)

This is a provocative opening line—ambiguous enough to pique our attention and specific enough to suggest a far-off, bird’s-eye view of the large urban setting in which the events of the novel will unfold. In the novel’s second paragraph, the narrator advances the idea that a city is not unlike a biological organism:

“Through the eyes of a high-flying night bird, we take in the scene from midair. In our broad sweep, the city looks like a single gigantic creature—or more likely a single collective entity created by many intertwining organisms.“

Reading the opening words, I thought to myself, “This is like a wide-angle shot in a film.” Imagine, then, my pleasant surprise when, almost twenty years later, Murakami wrote in a 2023 Introduction to the work: “After Dark is a very cinematic novel, written in a cinematic style. The story progressed as I followed images I had in my mind (like chasing after colorful butterflies in a forest).”

The Bell (1958)

This is a powerful beginning, and we are drawn further into the tale as the narrator continues with an exquisite explanation:

“The absent Paul, haunting her with letters and telephone bells and imagined footsteps on the stairs had begun to be the greater torment. Dora suffered from guilt, and with guilt came fear. She decided at last that the persecution of his presence was to be preferred to the persecution of his absence.”

A Severed Head (1961)

There’s an enticing quality about these first two lines of dialog, and things get even more intriguing as the narrator continues in the third paragraph:

“Georgie was silent for a moment and then said, ‘Good.’ That curt ‘Good’ was characteristic of her, typical of a toughness which had, to my mind, more to do with honesty than with ruthlessness. I liked the dry way in which she accepted our relationship. Only with a person so eminently sensible could I have deceived my wife.”

The Nice and the Good (1968)

In the novel’s second paragraph, the narrator continued: “At one moment a lazy fat man, a perfect sphere his loving wife called him, his name Octavian Gray, was slowly writing a witty sentence in a neat tiny hand upon creamy official paper while he inhaled from his breath the pleasant sleepy smell of an excellent lunch-time burgundy. Then came the shot.”

The Black Prince (1973)

Wiving: A Memoir of Loving Then Leaving the Patriarchy (2020)

This was one of my choices for The 20 Best Opening Lines of 2020 (to see the full list, go here). I had expected Myers’s memoir to be a relatively straightforward tale of self-discovery, but her opening words quickly set me straight. In addition to being a moving tale about her personal journey from young, devout Mormon girl to strong, independent woman, it is also a stirring polemic about life for women in a male-dominated world.

Myer continued: “In the story, a woman who is—according to an occult and capricious geometry of features and culture and a man’s particular taste—’beautiful’ must be attached to a man. To be unattached at my age is a violation of the story. This man wants an explanation. If my answer isn’t plausible, if there is no man waiting around the corner or recently dead or banging a college student, I should be grateful he is offering me a happy ending.

“His desire lands on my shoulders like a bird of prey.

“What he means is, I need you to fill the gap in me.“

Lolita (1955)

These legendary opening words come from Humbert Humbert, a middle-aged literature professor who, from the moment he first sees 12-year-old Dolores Haze sunbathing in a garden, goes completely gaga (he goes on to describe her as a “nymphet” and privately nicknames her Lolita).

In the novel, Humbert continued: “She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.”

When it came out, Lolita was widely regarded as a lewd or erotic novel, but apart from the unsettling pedophilic theme, there’s little lewdness, and even less eroticism, to be found in it. And, further, since the novel includes a murder, it might even be technically regarded as a crime story. I believe this is what writer Colin Falconer had in mind when he wrote about the opener in a 2021 blog post: “The best opening to a crime novel since Donald Westlake.”

Cry Macho: A Novel (1975)

The narrator is describing Mike Milo, an aging Texas rodeo star who has agreed to travel to Mexico City to kidnap the eleven-year-old son of Howard Polk, his former boss and a Texas rancher who is divorced, and severely estranged, from a Mexican woman who was his wife. In the first paragraph, the narrator continued: “Somebody had once told him—was it Howard?—that when the Mexican police shoot, the first shot is a boast, the second is a bullet.”

Cry Macho was originally written as a screenplay, but was adapted into a novel after the author failed to sell the film rights. Over the decades, numerous filmmakers attempted to turn the novel into a film, but without success. Clint Eastwood finally succeeded in producing, directing, and starring in a 2021 film adaptation. While the film received mixed reviews and underperformed at the box office, I thoroughly enjoyed it—and was also thoroughly impressed by what the 90-year-old Eastwood was still capable of doing.

Falling (2021)

This is a spectacular—indeed, an unforgettable—opening line, and I wish I’d known about it when I was compiling my list of The Best Opening Lines of 2021 (see the post here).

In a 2023 post on his “First Sentence Reader” blog, retired librarian Fred Roecker wrote: “Best first sentence ever. Sure beats ‘Call me Ishmael.’” It’s hard to disagree with Roecker’s assessment, and I would add that “hooks” don’t get much better than this one. In the novel, the narrator continued:

“She flung it into the air with a shriek. The bloodied mass hung in weightless suspension before being sucked out of the massive hole in the side of the aircraft.“

Newman wrote much of her debut novel while working as a flight attendant on “red-eye” flights for Virgin Atlantic Airways. After 30 drafts, she finally had something to show agents, but 41 query letters were rejected before Shane Salerno at The Story Factory took her on and landed her a two-book, seven-figure deal with Avid Reader Press, a Simon & Schuster imprint. Even before the book was published, a heated bidding war for film rights, ensued, with Universal Pictures offering the stunned young writer yet another seven-figure deal (one concept description was “Jaws at 35,000 feet”). Falling became a publishing sensation, debuting at Number Two on The New York Times bestseller list and ultimately making a number of “Best Book of the Year” lists. Look for the film version later in 2023.

The Time Traveller’s Wife (2003)

In this hard-to-classify novel (part romance novel, part science-fiction), the opening words come from Chicago artist Clare Anne Abshire, wife of Henry DeTamble, a librarian with a rare genetic disorder that causes him to involuntarily travel through time.

The Time Traveller’s Wife was a stunningly successful debut novel for Niffenegger, a Chicago visual artist who said she wrote the book as a metaphor for her many failed romantic relationships. An immediate New York Times bestseller, it was named the 2003 Amazon Book of the Year.

Her Fearful Symmetry (2009)

The Moon’s a Balloon (1971)

When the English publisher Hamish Hamilton published Niven’s memoir in Great Britain in 1971, this was the spectacular opening. However, if you went on to read Dell Publishing’s American version of the book, published a year later, you saw a different opening. Clearly, American publishers felt great discomfort about broaching the idea of sex with a minor girl, so they persuaded Niven to modify his opening paragraph. He made a few other tweaks as well, as you will see below:

“Nessie, when I first saw her, was nineteen, honey-blond, pretty rather than beautiful, a figure like a two-armed Venus de Milo who had been on a sensible diet, had a pair of legs that went on forever, and a glorious sense of the ridiculous. She was a Picadilly whore. I was a fourteen-year-old heterosexual schoolboy, and I met her thanks to my stepfather. (If you would like to skip on and meet Nessie more fully, she reappears on page 42.)”

Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

These are the very first words of the book, coming from what is essentially an untitled Preface. When Noah, the popular host of The Daily Show, was born in Johannesburg, South Africa in 1984, his father had Swiss-German heritage and his mother was of Xhosa descent (a people native to the region). At the time, South Africa was governed by a strict policy of apartheid, which made interracial marriage—and, in fact, all intimate interracial relationships—illegal. A year after Noah’s birth, interracial relationships were decriminalized, but the very notion that he was born a crime went on to become a defining feature of his life, and it was no surprise when he chose the phrase as the title of his memoir.

In the opening paragraph above, Noah succinctly summarized the political strategy behind apartheid rule. In the second, he continued: “At the time, black South Africans outnumbered white south Africans nearly five to one, yet we were divided into different tribes with different languages…. Long before apartheid existed these tribal factions clashed and warred with one another. Then white rule used that animosity to divide and conquer. All nonwhites were systematically classified into various groups and subgroups. Then these groups were given differing levels of rights and privileges in order to keep them at odds.”

In the formal first Chapter of his memoir, titled “Run,” Noah began with what are usually described as the opening words of the book: “Sometimes in big Hollywood movies they’ll have these crazy chase scenes where somebody jumps or gets thrown from a moving car. The person hits the ground and rolls for a bit. Then they come to a stop and pop up and dust themselves off, like it was no big deal. Whenever I see that I think, That’s rubbish. Getting thrown out of a moving car hurts way worse than that.”

And then, in the next paragraph, he added: “I was nine years old when my mother threw me out of a moving car.” This unusual and, quite frankly, intriguing revelation pretty much ensured that readers would want to find out more about the incident—and why he would choose to begin his memoir with it.

Unraveling Oliver (2014)

These are unsettling, but deeply compelling opening words, and it’s impossible for me to imagine a reader not reading on to see where the story is going. In the opening paragraph, the title character—Oliver Ryan, the philandering husband of wife Alice—continued:

“She just lay on the floor, holding her jaw. Staring at me. Silent. She didn’t even seem to be surprised.”

Shortly after the book was published, a People magazine review said about the first sentence: “From that searing opening line, the ‘who’ and the ‘what’ of this unnerving psychological thriller are never in doubt…it’s the ‘why’ that fascinates as Nugent expertly peels back the layers to reveal the truth.” And in a 2023 review on GetLiterary.com, Sara Roncero-Menendez wrote: “Liz Nugent has crafted a cerebral thriller that will have readers questioning how well they really know anyone in their lives.”

Lying in Wait (2016)

In a 2023 Guardian article on the “Top 10 First Lines in Fiction,” Nugent wrote: “The opening may establish the tone, character, location, era or season but it can also pull a reader into the realm of the story that follows, and often into the head of the protagonist.” In the first sentence of Lying in Wait, I think you will agree that she does all that, and more. In the opening paragraph the narrator continued:

“After we had overcome the initial shock, I tried to stop him thinking of her. I did not allow it unless to confirm alibis or to discuss covering up any possible evidence. It upset him too much and I thought it best to move on as if nothing had happened.”

In a 2018 review in Brit + Co, California entrepreneur Brit Morin wrote: “Though we know Lydia and Andrew Fitzsimmons’ big secret by the end of the first sentence…the secret may be out, but the intrigue remains.”

Skin Deep (2018)

This is a sizzling first sentence, and—although Nugent wasn’t thinking specifically about it five years later in a 2023 Guardian article—she perfectly characterized it herself when she wrote:

“When we open a book, we are ready to embark on a journey. The starter pistol should propel us forward. In my experience, a great opening will also raise questions that needs to be answered.”

Questions abound after Skin Deep’s first line hurtled out of the gate, and it is almost impossible to imagine a reader—including this one—not quickly reading on for the answers.

Little Cruelties (2020)

In a review on SwirlandThread.com, writer Mairéad Hearne wrote, “There is almost an expectation with a Liz Nugent book of a dramatic and game-setting opening line and in Our Little Cruelties that expectation is very much fulfilled.”

Strange Sally Diamond (2023)

No other contemporary crime novelist has excelled Nugent in the crafting of memorable opening lines, and she continues to set a high bar in her most recent novel. In a 2023 Guardian article on her own favorite first lines in fiction, Nugent might have had this opener in mind when she wrote:

“In my own work, I like to set the opening line in the aftermath of a major event. I write first-person narratives and the reaction of the protagonist to this event should give the reader a good indication of the type of character we are dealing with.”

I’ve was delighted to honor Nugent’s exceptional opening paragraph in my annual Smerconish.com post on “23 of the Best Opening Lines of 2023” (you can see the full compilation here).

Girls in Their Married Bliss (1964)

This is an okay opening line right up to the final word—and with that single addition, it is transformed into a great one.

July, July (2002)

“The Geranium,” in Accent: A Quarterly of New Literature (Summer 1946); reprinted in The Geranium: A Collection of Short Stories (1947)

In a 2020 WritingCooperative.com article (titled “11 Proven Ways of Inviting Readers In”), writer Jim Latham wrote: “O’Connor engages our interest by making us wonder just how long Old Dudley has been sitting in his chair if he is molding the wood to the shape of his body. It must have been a long time, indeed, if waiting to see a potted plant is the focal point of his day. Wondering this, we are not only curious about Old Dudley, but we also begin to feel sympathy for him. O’Connor also gives us the interesting image of looking out one window and into another. What happened to blacken the brick around the second window?”

Wise Blood (1952)

O’Connor was a master of in media res (“In the middle of things”) opening, and the first sentence of her debut novel is a particularly good example. Readers are immediately engaged because they expect the protagonist to be female rather than male. And once this fact settles in, they’re left wondering: what is going on in Hazel’s life that has left him in such an emotionally agitated state?

The Violent Bear It Away (1960)

This is the darkly intriguing opening sentence of O’Connor’s second and final novel, and there are many, many things to admire about it. I’ve got to admit, though, it was the part about dragging the “still sitting” dead body from the breakfast table that hooked me.

In a 2014 Whizpast.com post, writer Joel Willans included this first paragraph on his list of “The 13 Greatest Opening Lines from Novels of the 1960s.” And in “The Violent Wisdom of Flannery O’Connor,” a 2016 essay in TheImaginativeConservative.org, writer and academic Joseph Pearce wrote about the opener: “It is, in my unapologetically opinionated judgment, one of the best and most memorable opening lines in all of literature. How can one read such a sentence and not feel compelled to continue reading?”

“Revelation,” in The Sewanee Review (Spring 1964); reprinted in Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965)

When I first read this opening sentence, I was struck by the idea that a woman could be so large she could make a small room seem even smaller. It was a neat hook, and I was eager to read on.

In “A Catholic Thinker” blog post in 2013 (“The Mean Grace of Flannery O’Conner”), physician Tod Worner offered what I regard as one of the best assessments ever made about the author: “Flannery O’Connor’s writing could be downright vicious and raw. Her characters are often crude, unkempt, and ill-educated. Bereft of redeeming qualities and brimming with flaws, it is easy to be repelled by them and the path their lives are taking. And yet, with writing that is so vivid, so animated, so…real, it is difficult to release yourself from its grip.”

I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death (2017)

Suspenseful beginnings are a staple of Great Opening Lines, and this one is extraordinary. After the first four paragraphs, I was eager—and even a little anxious, I must admit—to read on. I suspect any reader with a pulse would feel similarly.

In her memoir, O’Farrell, one of England’s most popular contemporary novelists, went on to describe the first of seventeen “brushes with death” that she has experienced at different stages of her relatively young life (she was in her early forties when the book was published).

A book about so many near-death experiences might seem a little gloomy, but Ann Patchett described the memoir as “a gripping and glorious investigation of death that leaves the reader feeling breathless, grateful and fully alive.” London’s The Sunday Times called it “a mesmerizing read,” adding that “O’Farrell writes so convincingly about peril that each episode just serves as another detailed, technicolor reminder that we and, more terrifyingly, our loved ones are only ever one bad decision, faulty choice, or sliver or ill-fortune away from catastrophe.”

Expensive People [Book 2 of the Wonderland Quartet] (1968)

The concept of a child being a murderer immediately raises a number of questions: Who was murdered? Why did the child do it? And how?

The opening words come from Richard Everett, an angry, obese adolescent boy growing up in an upscale Detroit suburb in the 1960s (his father is a successful business executive, his mother a glamorous novelist who describes herself as a Russian émigré, but actually grew up in a working-class family in upstate New York). Throughout the first chapter, Richard makes frequent reference to being a murderer, but provides no details. It’s clear we must read on to learn more, and we do so eagerly.

In a 2016 “Lonesome Reader” blog post, Eric Karl Anderson wrote: “The opening lines from novels and stories by Joyce Carol Oates are sometimes startling, sometimes mordantly funny, sometimes ironic, sometimes gruesome, sometimes elegantly simple and sometimes questioningly philosophical. But they all have the ability to grip you and make you want to read more.“ I hope you will enjoy the ones I’m featuring here.

You Must Remember This (1987)

These gripping words come from the book’s Prologue. In the next three paragraphs, the narrator continued:

“She swallowed the tablets slowly and carefully drinking tepid water from the faucet.

“She knew to go slowly and carefully not wanting to get overexcited feverish not wanting to get sick to her stomach.

“Better to light a single candle than to curse the darkness her father often said but she preferred the darkness.”

Because It is Bitter, and Because It is My Heart (1990)

Oates has crafted many memorable openings in her career, but few are more compelling, leading a reviewer in Long Island’s Newsday newspaper to write, “Oates is a gifted storyteller, establishing from the first page a hypnotic, lyrical voice [that] bears the stamp of truth.” In the opening paragraph, the narrator continued:

“It’s the buglelike cries of gulls that alert the fisherman—gulls with gunmetal-gray wings, dazzling snowy heads and tail feathers, dangling pink legs like something incompletely hatched. The kind you think might be a beautiful bird until you get up close.”

About the opening words, Marilynne Robinson (Gilead, Home, and other works) wrote in a New York Times review: “The precision of this language is of a kind with the uncanny aptness of dream imagery, communicating its brilliant flood of sensory and emotional experience.”

My Life as a Rat (2019)

This painful declaration comes from Violet Rue Kerrigan, a 25-year-old woman who, thirteen years earlier, was presented with a gut-wrenching choice: do the right thing by telling the truth about a violent, racist murder, or lie about it to protect members of her family.

Delirium (2011)

The year is 2091 and the narrator is Lena Haloway, a 17-year-old girl who continues: “Everyone else in my family has had the procedure already. My older sister, Rachel, has been disease free for nine years now. She’s been safe from love for so long, she says she can’t even remember its symptoms. I’m scheduled to have my procedure in exactly ninety-five days.”

In a 2016 Guardian article on “The Best Opening Lines in Children’s and Young Adult Fiction,” Ciara Murphy wrote: “From the first line of her novel, Oliver welcomes us into a world very much unlike our own, with a unique twist on the dystopian theme, and promises us a love story quite unlike any we’ve ever read before.”

Warlight (2018)

The opening words come from 26-year-old Nathaniel Williams, who is recalling a dramatic moment from a dozen years earlier, when he was fourteen and his sister Rachel was sixteen. He continued:

“We were living on a street in London called Ruvigny Gardens, and one morning either our mother or our father suggested that after breakfast the family have a talk, and they told us they would be leaving us and going to Singapore for a year. Not too long, they said, but it would not be a brief trip either. We would of course be well cared for in their absence.”

A starred review in Publisher’s Weekly said about the novel: “Mesmerizing from the first sentence, rife with poignant insights and satisfying subplots, this novel about secrets and loss may be Ondaatje’s best work yet.”

Where the Crawdads Sing (2018)

After this lush opening, the reader is immediately immersed in what appears to be a Southern coastal setting. The narrator continued with a subtle suggestion that this would be no ordinary day for young Catherine “Kya” Clark:

“Standing on the stool, she stopped scrubbing grits from the pot and lowered it into the basin of worn-out suds. No sounds now but her own breathing. Who had left the shack? Not Ma. She never let the door slam.”

Even the publisher of the book (Putnam) had low expectations for this debut novel of a retired and reclusive wildlife biologist, but it caught fire after Reese Witherspoon selected it for her “Hello Sunshine” book club (she said she “loved every page of it”). It went on to become the bestselling book of the year, on the New York Times fiction best-seller list for 67 weeks, 30 in the top position. By July 2022, the book had sold over 15 million copies, and that number was expected to only increase after Reese Witherspoon’s film company released a film adaptation that was a box office success despite mixed critical reviews.

Sheila Levine is Dead and Living in New York (1972)

A Little Bit Married (1984)

The narrator continued: “He had, over the years, felt godlike, and like a God, but this was the closest he had ever come to being the ruler of the universe Himself. It should have alarmed Marjorie, because God had never taken a wife.”

Hugger Mugger [Book 27 in the Spenser series] (2000)

In the novel’s opening paragraph, Spenser continued with a reference to Boston therapist Susan Silverman, his longtime girlfriend: “Susan says that supreme happiness for me would probably involve having sex while watching a ball game. Since she knows this, I’ve never understood why, when we’re at Fenway Park, she remains so prudish.”

The Kiss of Deception [Book 1 of The Remnant Chronicles] (2014)

The intriguing opening words come from narrator and protagonist Princess Lia, a 17-year-old girl whose happy world has been shattered when her royal parents arranged for her to be married to a man she has never met, the prince of a neighboring kingdom. In a 2016 “Nerdy Talks” blog post, Eunice Moral included it in her “Best Opening Lines” compilation.

In the novel’s second paragraph, Lia continued: “The wind knew. It was the first of June, but cold gusts bit at the hilltop citadelle as fiercely as deepest winter, shaking the windows with curses and winding through drafty halls with warning whispers. There was no escaping what was to come.”

The State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity (2017)

In nonfiction works especially, a no-nonsense opening line that gets right to the heart of the matter is hard to beat—and Perel does that very nicely here. In her opening paragraph, she continued:

“Yet this extremely common act is poorly understood.”

“Easter Sunday,” in A Dream of Countries Where No One Dare Live (1993)

The narrator, a boy named Peter, continued: “I had taken to dreaming about him, but the dreams were always about him, never with him if you know what I mean.”

It Had to Be You [Book One of Chicago Stars series] (2013)

I loved this opening line from the moment I first read it, and things got even better as the narrator continued: “She sat at the gravesite like a fifties movie queen with the small white poodle perched in her lap and a pair of rhinestone-studded cat’s-eye sunglasses shielding her eyes. It was difficult for the mourners to decide who looked more out of place—the perfectly clipped poodle sporting a pair of matching peach satin ear bows, Phoebe’s unbelievably handsome Hungarian with his long, beaded ponytail, or Phoebe herself.”

House Rules (2010)

The first paragraph is a classic hook. As soon as readers take the bait, the next two paragraphs begin to reel them in:

“He is sprawled like a starfish in front of the fireplace. Blood covers his temple and his hands. For a moment, I can’t move, can’t breathe.

Suddenly, he sits up. “Mom,” Jacob says, “you’re not even trying.”

The Book of Two Ways (2020)

The opening words come from protagonist Dawn Edelstein, whose phone has just awakened her from a deep sleep while on an airplane flight. She continues: “When my phone alarm chimes, I fish it out from the pocket of my cargo pants. I’ve forgotten, with the time change, to turn off the reminder. I’m still groggy with sleep, but I open the date and read the names.”

Wish You Were Here (2021)

The opening words come from Diana O’Toole, a 29-year-old Manhattan woman whose life is going about as well as she could have hoped. She has a satisfying job at Sotheby’s, is engaged to a handsome surgical resident, and is planning a 30th birthday trip to the Galapagos Islands. She begins, though, by reflecting on an important childhood memory, and as she continues in the opening paragraph, she concludes with a haunting statement about her mother:

“My father was working as a conservator, one of a handful restoring the zodiac ceiling on the main hall of Grand Central Terminal—an aqua sky string with shimmering constellations. It was late, way past my bedtime, but my father took me to work because my mother—as usual—was not home.”

Mad Honey (2022)

If some novel openers are hooks, then others, as we see here, are lures, gently teasing and tantalizing until bam! the reader takes the bait. The final words—who would never be someone’s victim—reverberate in our minds as we feel compelled to read on.

Unprotected: A Memoir (2021)

Porter, one of Broadway’s most gifted performers, continued in his memoir’s second paragraph: “By the time I was five, it was all too clear that something was wrong with me. Everyone knew it, and I knew it too. It was why grown-ups shook their heads and spoke in lowered tones whenever I was in the room. It was why I had to talk to a Nice White Man once a week, in his office in the big building up the street. The man and I played games, and he asked me a lot of questions. Sometimes I knew the answers and sometimes I was confused.”

As a young boy, Porter said, “I was drawn to all the wrong pastimes,” and he ticked off a host of examples: Double Dutch jump rope, Easy-Bake Ovens, taffeta and lace fabrics, the hats worn by church ladies, and his Aunt Sharon’s shoes, especially her “candy-apple red pumps,” which ultimately got him banished from her bedroom.

Reflecting back on those weekly office visits, Porter wrote: “I wasn’t confused about why I was there. The Nice White Man was a doctor. He was working to help fix me. I didn’t know the name of the mysterious affliction, but I did know that it had already manifested itself in many unacceptable ways.”

Porter’s memoir opened so impressively that I selected it for a Smerconish.com post on “Twenty-One of the Best Opening Lines of 2021.“

True Grit (1968)

The opening words come from the elderly Mattie Ross, who is recalling how her incredible story began when she was a young girl. She continued: “I was just fourteen years of age when a coward going by the name of Tom Chaney shot my father down in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and robbed him of his life and his horse and $150 in cash money plus two California gold pieces that he carried in his trouser band.”

In a 2018 LiteraryHub.com post, managing editor Emily Temple described this as a “Perfect First Paragraph.” She wrote: “Portis has Mattie’s voice and character nailed from the very first lines…. She is fourteen, after all, and a girl, which means that most of the other characters in this book consider her ill-suited for chasing after her father’s murderer. But the reader is already pretty sure that she is not ill-suited, having been inside her head.”

Eventually, young Mattie hires a hard-drinking, one-eyed U.S. Marshall named Rooster Cogburn to help find her father’s killer. John Wayne was so taken with the Cogburn character that he quickly bought the film rights. In the 1969 film adaptation the very next year, Wayn’es performance won him the Best Actor Academy Award.

In a 2010 Newsweek article, Malcolm Jones wrote: “True Grit is one of the great American novels, with two of the greatest characters in our literature and a story worthy of their greatness. It is not just a book you can read over and over. It’s a book you want to read over and over, and each time you’re surprised by how good it is. In every Portis novel, someone makes some kind of journey. His protagonists all have a little Don Quixote in them. They are at odds with the ordinary ways of making do, and they don’t care what the world thinks. In True Grit, these elements are the raw ingredients for one of the finer epic journeys in American literature.”

The Dog of the South (1979)

These words introduce us to Raymond E. Midge, a Little Rock, Arkansas ex-newspaper reporter who has now returned to college to work on a degree. He continued: “They had taken my car and my Texaco card and my American Express card. Dupree had also taken from the bedroom closet my good raincoat and a shotgun and perhaps some other articles.”

A 1979 Kirkus Review said of the novel: “Portis holds our attention in a headlock by being so relaxed and unfazed and good-natured—in a funky, off-center book that never guns its motor and yet is always arriving at some place that’s green and fresh and funny.“

The Disappearance of Childhood (1982)

This is not simply a Great Opening Line, it is one of the best things ever said on the topic of children (one day, I’m hoping to do a book titled The Single Best Thing Ever Said on Just About Any Topic You Can Think Of, and this is my Number One choice for observations about children).

The Echo Maker (2006)

It’s always nice to see a novel begin with a beautiful description, but this one also contains the interesting tidbit that a flock of cranes may also be correctly called a kettle (technically, a kettle is a gathering of any group of soaring birds—including cranes and vultures—that utilize circular updrafts of warm air to gain elevation).

In the opening paragraph, the narrator continued: “Scores of Grus canadensis settle on the thawing river. They gather on the island flats, grazing, beating their wings, trumpeting: the advance wave of a mass evacuation. More birds land by the minute, the air red with calls.”

“Brokeback Mountain,” in Close Range: Wyoming Stories (1999); based on a slightly shorter version in The New Yorker (October 13, 1997)

To qualify as a great opener, the words don’t have to be short, punchy, and succinct, they must simply be well written—and that is what we see in this description of a man who appears to be a working cowboy. In the opening paragraph, Proulx continues to draw readers into the story by suggesting that this cowboy won’t be working much longer.

“The wind booms down the curved length of the trailer and under its roaring passage he can hear the scratching of fine gravel and sand. It could be bad on the highway with the horse trailer. He has to be packed and away from the place that morning. Again the ranch is on the market and they’ve shipped out the last of the horses, paid everybody off the day before, the owner saying, “Give em to the real estate shark, I’m outa here.” Dropping the keys in Ennis’s hand.”

All in all, it’s an exceptionally well written—if somewhat somber—scene. And then, Proulx concludes the 212-word paragraph with an unexpected, and completely stunning, final sentence:

“He might have to stay with his married daughter until he picks up another job, yet he is suffused with a sense of pleasure because Jack Twist had been in his dream.”

The original short story went on to win the National Magazine Award for Fiction in 1998. A slightly expanded version of the story was published in Close Range: Wyoming Stories (1999), which went on to become a finalist for the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In 2005, the story was adapted into a popular film by the same title, starring Heath Ledger as Ennis Del Mar and Jake Gyllenhaal as Jack Twist.

“Tits-Up in a Ditch,” in The New Yorker (June 2, 2008)

In the opening paragraph, the narrator continued: “People said that Shaina Lister, with aquamarine eyes and curls the shining maroon of water-birch bark, had won all the kiddie beauty contests and then had become the high-school slut, knocked up when she was fifteen and cutting out the day after Dakotah was born, slinking and wincing, still in her hospital johnny, down the back stairs of Mercy Maternity to the street, where one of her greasy pals picked her up and headed west for Los Angeles.”

In the hands of a lesser writer, we might have seen an opening paragraph that went something like this: “The day after she was born, Dakotah Lister was abandoned, left all alone in the hospital as her fifteen-year-old mother drove away with her boyfriend.” But Proulx, as her many fans will tell you, is no average writer. And, in case you’re wondering, the intriguing title of the short story is a colloquial expression commonly used by farmers in the Great Plains and American west to refer to a dead cow found in a field or ditch.

Berg (1964)

In “Who Cares About Ann Quin?” a 2007 article in The Guardian, editor and writer Lee Rourke wrote:

“For me this is the greatest opening first line of any novel I have ever read. It is from…a debut novel so staggeringly superior to most you’ll never forget it—and by one of our greatest ever novelists too. The thing is, though, no one ever seems to have heard of her. It is something that has rankled within me for a long time now: why, I demand to know, does nobody care about Ann Quin?”

Butts: A Backstory (2022)

To be honest, I’m not sure which I liked best, the opening words, the book’s title, or the engaging cover. All three captivated me from the very beginning, and Butts went on to become my favorite non-fiction book of the year. I was also pleased to include the whimsical opener in my compilation of “The Best Opening Lines of 2022” on Smerconish.com (see the full list here).

In a Washington Post review, Karen Heller might have been speaking for me when she wrote: “What appears initially as a folly with a look-at-this cover and title becomes, thanks to Radke’s intelligence and curiosity, something much meatier, entertaining, and wise.”

I became immediately engaged after reading the opening words, thinking to myself: “Nobody remembers their own butt, because they can’t see it; you can only remember what you see.” Imagine my pleasant surprise, then, when Radke went on to write a bit later: “In some ways, the butt belongs to the viewer more than the viewed. It can be observed secretly, ogled in private, creepily scrutinized.”

Ada’s Rules: A Sexy Skinny Novel (2012)

The narrator is describing Ada Howard, a hefty (five-feet-two, 220 pounds), middle-aged Nashville woman married to Lucius Howard, the pastor of a church in one of the city’s black neighborhoods. The narrator continued: “The journey had begun in the usual way. She was approaching a twenty-fifth college reunion, where she would see the man who got away, a man Ada hadn’t seen in twenty years.”

Reading the book, I couldn’t decide if this was a diet book disguised as a novel, or vice versa. In a starred review, Publisher’s Weekly wrote, “It is impossible not to fall in love with the plucky plus-size heroine,” adding, “A heartwarming and engaging read, Ada’s story is more than that―readers following Randall’s rules will drop the pounds along with Ada, and perhaps discover something about themselves.”

The Sojourner (1953)

This oxymoronic notion of unmourning mourners has piqued the attention of readers for many years. And, as they read one, they quickly discover that this is a writer with both style and skill. In the opening paragraph, the narrator continued:

“These were the widow Amelia Linden, and the two tall sons, Benjamin and Asahel. The funeral assembly had gone. The clomp of horses’ feet and the rattle of wheels were faint down the frozen lane. There was a pure instant of silence. Then a wind keened far off in the west, nosed across the hills and leaped into the clearing, snapping its fangs at the limbs of the oak trees. The last leaves shivered to earth and scurried like thin brown rats across the grave.”

The Newsmakers (1987)

A legendary figure in the world of quotations, Rees was the longtime host of BBC Radio 4’s popular quiz show “Quote…Unquote.” He has authored scores of acclaimed reference books on quotations, phrases, and sayings, many regarded as classics. He also wrote a few novels, and in The Newsmakers, he proved he could also craft a superb opening line.

The Last of the Wine (1956)

The dramatic opening words come from Alexias, a young Athenian aristocrat who became famous for his beauty and athleticism. The Last of the Wine was Renault’s seventh novel, the first one to be set in ancient Greece (ultimately her favorite historical period), and the second to explore the dynamics of male homosexuality.

Asta’s Book [written under the pen name Barbara Vine and published in the U.S. under the title Anna’s Book] (1993)

The opening line of the novel is the first entry made in a diary begun in 1905 by 25-year-old Asta, a Danish woman living in East London with her husband and two sons. Asta, who is pregnant and hoping for a daughter this time, has no idea as she is writing these words that her diary will one day become famous all over England.

A Hole in the World: An American Boyhood (1990)

In a New York Times review, Russell Banks wrote about these opening words: “The first sentence sets the stage and tone of Richard Rhodes wrenching childhood memoir.” When the book was published, Rhodes was one of America’s most respected writers. Two years earlier, his The Making of the Atomic Bomb had won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction, the National Book Award for Nonfiction, and the National Book Critics Circle Award in General Nonfiction.

As Rhodes paused to reflect on his own first sentence, he confessed to an overwhelming surge of emotion, writing: “And good lord, writing these words now, all these years afterward, for the first time in memory my eyes have filled with tears of mourning for her.”

Rhodes brought his opening paragraph to a close with a sorrowful reflection that clarified the meaning of the book’s title: “At the beginning of my life the world acquired a hole. That’s what I knew, that there was a hole in the world. For me there still is. It’s a singularity. In and out of a hole like that, anything goes.”

Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)

These powerful-but-enigmatic opening words come from Bertha Mason, a mixed-race Jamaican woman who became the first wife of Mr. Rochester, of Jane Eyre fame. In the opening paragraph, she continued: “The negroes hated us, too. ’You ain’t nothing but white cockroach niggers,’ the young Tia said, stealing my dress as I bathed alone in the lush sensuality of the biblical garden pond.”

Rhys wrote Wide Sargasso Sea as a prequel to Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 classic Jane Eyre. In the Brontë novel, Mr. Rochester describes Bertha as a raving lunatic, and she ends up becoming the madwoman in his attic. In Rhys’s novel, Bertha Mason is described as a false name for Antoinette Cosway, who, not surprisingly, provides a very different version of her life story.

In a 2009 review on NPR’s “All Things Considered,” writer Sara Paretsky wrote about Bertha/Antoinette: “Rhys makes you understand that the Madwoman in the Attic isn’t Brontë’s swollen, drunken avatar of passion. She’s a Creole, a woman of mixed European and African descent, like Rhys herself. The author understands how Europeans imagined West Indians—as sensual, almost animal in their passions. After reading this novel, we come to know Jane Eyre’s Madwoman as a woman who’s made mad by the bewildering white and male world in which she loses everything: her home, her beauty and, above all, her identity.”

“The Big Nap,” in The New Yorker (July 6, 2021); and ultimately in the anthology New Teeth: Stories (2021)

In a New York Times review, Sarah Lyall wrote about this opening paragraph: “Alert readers will recognize the cadence, vocabulary and world-weary tone of Raymond Chandler in The Big Sleep. But this detective is even more clueless than Philip Marlowe: He’s a toddler looking for a lost stuffed unicorn who can’t even figure out how the client, his own baby sister, got into the house.”

By the time we finish the story’s second paragraph, it’s abundantly clear that we’re in for an entertaining ride—or should I say entertaining read. The detective continued: “Her past was murky. The detective had heard that she came from the hospital. But there was also a rumor she’d once lived inside Mommy’s tummy. It didn’t add up. Still, a job was a job. ‘So, what brings you here?’ asked the detective”

In her review, Lyall continued about the story: “A triumph of sustained humor that works equally well as a parody of hard-boiled noir detective fiction and as a moving account of siblings banding together against a world that makes no sense, “The Big Nap” is the best thing in an uneven but mostly delightful book by the extravagantly talented Rich. Really, I wish I could just keep quoting from it.”

Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex (2008)

Manipulating his kneecaps? Where on earth could this be going? It all becomes clear—and delightfully so—as Roach continues in her opening paragraph: “The study concerns human sexual response. Kneecap manipulation elicits no sexual response, on this planet anyway, and that is why the man is doing it: It’s the control activity. (Earlier, the man was told to manipulate the more usual suspect while the researchers measured whatever it was they were measuring.)”

About Bonk, writer A. J. Jacobs (The Year of Living Biblically) said: “I would read Mary Roach on the history of Quonset huts. But Mary Roach on sex? That’s a godsend!” As we saw earlier with Roach’s Stiff book, many of the opening lines of other chapters in Bonk are also inspired. Let me cite a few examples. In Ch. 2 (“Dating the Penis-Camera”), Roach began: “Let me state it simply. Women came into Masters and Johnson’s laboratory and had sex with a thrusting mechanical penis-camera that filmed—from the inside—their physical responses to it.”

Ch. 6 (“The Taiwanese Fix and the Penile Pricking Ring”), opened this way: “A man having penis surgery is the opposite of a man in a fig leaf. He is concealed face-to-feet in surgical sheets, with only his penis on view. It appears in a small, square cutout in the fabric, spotlit by surgical lamps.”

And in Ch. 12 (“Mind Over Vagina”), Roach’s opening paragraph began: “The human vagina is accustomed to visitors. Even the language of anatomy imbues the organ with an innlike hospitality, the entrance to the structure being named the ‘vaginal vestibule.’ Take off your coat and stay awhile.”

Still Life With Woodpecker (1980)

This is the attention-grabbing first sentence of the Prologue to the book. A Prologue or Preface is generally a kind of Author’s Note to the reader, and, for the most part, is not generally regarded as a novel’s “opening line.” It’s rare for a Prologue to open so strikingly, but this one is a refreshing exception to the rule.

The official opening words of the novel—at the beginning of Chapter One—are also pretty special: “In the last quarter of the twentieth century, at a time when Western civilization was declining too rapidly for comfort and yet too slowly to be very exciting, much of the world sat on the edge of an increasingly expensive theater seat, waiting—with various combinations of dread, hope, and ennui—for something momentous to occur.”

A few years back, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that a classic Dan Fogelberg song was inspired by this novel. Here’s how the singer-songwriter expressed the thought in an interview: “Make Love Stay was based on a book written by Tom Robbins called Still Life With Woodpecker. It was wonderful. It presumed the most difficult concept a man in the late twentieth century has to really wrestle with is how to make love stay. I loved the idea. I thought that was a great philosophical moment, so I just wrote some music, basically to his ideas.”

“The Kiss,” in Playboy (Feb., 1990); reprinted under the title “Kissing” in Wild Ducks Flying Backward (2005)

These are the opening lines of arguably the most entertaining essay ever written on the subject of kissing. Robbins went on to write: “Kissing . . . didn’t imitate nature so much as it restructured it. Kissing molded the face into a brand-new shape, the pucker shape, and then, like some renegade scientist grafting plops of sea urchin onto halves of ripe pink plums, it found a way to fuse the puckers, to meld them and animate them, so that one pucker rubbing against another generates heat, moisture, and a luminous neuro-muscular friction. Thomas Edison, switch off your dim bulb and slink away.” Robbins continued in this vein for three more pages, in a veritable tour de force on one of history’s most fascinating subjects.

Three Fates (2002)

When I came upon this opener many years ago, my first thought was, “This is not only a spectacular opening line, it’s coming from a female author who really gets the way men think. Wyley, readers will shortly learn, is a passenger on the RMS Lusitania, and the narrator continued about him:

“It was a perfectly harmless fantasy that did nothing to distress the blonde, or Henry’s wife, and put Henry himself in the best of moods.”

I Never Had It Made: An Autobiography of Jackie Robinson (1995; with Alfred Duckett)

Home: A Novel (2008)

Great literature is filled with sad lines, but the opening sentence of Home is one of the saddest I recall from all my years of reading. Does Glory’s emotional state reflect what the 38-year-old woman is expecting to find upon returning to her childhood home? Or does it capture recent life events that have necessitated this move? The dismal tone doesn’t make us eager to read on, but we have to.

The narrator continued about the scene at the front door: “He attempted a twinkle of joy at this thought, but his eyes were damp with commiseration. ‘To stay for a while this time!’ he amended, and took her bag from her, first shifting his cane to his weaker hand. Dear God, she thought, dear God in heaven.”

On Violence and On Violence Against Women (2021)

Goodbye, Columbus (1959)

The opening words come from narrator and protagonist Neil Klugman, a young Jewish underachiever who is currently working at a low-level job in a public library. He is immediately smitten by a beautiful—and also Jewish—Radcliffe student who clearly seems out of his league. He continued:

“She dove beautifully, and a moment later she was swimming back to the side of the pool, her head of short-clipped auburn hair held up, straight ahead of her, as though it were a rose on a long stem. The rose glided dry to the edge and then it was beside me. ’Thank you,’ she said, her eyes watery though not from the water. She extended a hand for her glasses but did not put them on until she turned and headed away. I watched her move off. Her hands suddenly appeared behind her. She caught the bottom of her suit between thumb and index finger and flicked what flesh had been showing back where it belonged. My blood jumped.”

Originally written as a novella, Goodbye, Columbus won the 1960 National Book Award for Fiction and was ultimately adapted into a popular 1969 film starring Richard Benjamin and Ali McGraw as the unlikely couple.

Portnoy’s Complaint (1969)

So begins one of the 20th century’s most controversial novels, with protagonist Alexander Portnoy sharing a thought about his mother with his psychoanalyst, Dr. Spielvogel. The entire rest of the novel is a continuous monologue of Portnoy talking to his shrink in the most candid and explicit ways (including, of course, his infamous description of masturbation using a product sold in any neighborhood meat market). That scene from the book, by the way, led writer Jacqueline Susann (of Valley of the Dolls fame) to quip: “He’s a fine writer, but I wouldn’t want to shake hands with him.“

In the novel’s first paragraph, patient Portnoy continued: “As soon as the last bell had sounded, I would rush off for home, wondering as I ran if I could possibly make it to our apartment before she had succeeded in transforming herself. Invariably she was already in the kitchen by the time I arrived, and setting out my milk and cookies. Instead of causing me to give up my delusions, however, the feat merely intensified my respect for her powers.“

In its 1998 ranking of The 100 Best English-Language Novels of the 20th Century, The Modern Library ranked Portnoy’s Complaint at Number 52.

The Anatomy Lesson (1983)

Few writers were better than Roth at crafting the opening words of a novel, and this is one of his best. In the first paragraph, he continued:

“He’s never had so many women at one time, or so many doctors, or drunk so much vodka, or done so little work, or known despair of such wild proportions. Yet he didn’t seem to have a disease that anybody could take seriously. Only the pain—in his neck, arms, and shoulders, pain that made it difficult to walk for more than a few city blocks or even to stand very long in one place. Just having a neck, arms, and shoulders was like carrying another person around. Ten minutes out getting the groceries and he had to hurry home and lie down.”

Sabbath’s Theater (1995)

This is the troubling dilemma facing sixty-four-year-old Mickey Sabbath, a former puppeteer and aging sexual libertine. He’s been thrust into this situation by his lover of many years, Drenka Balich. It’s a delicious tale, and it went on to win the 1995 National Book Award for Fiction.

In the novel, the narrator continued about Mickey’s unfortunate situation: “This was the ultimatum, the maddeningly improbable, wholly unforeseen ultimatum, that the mistress of fifty-two delivered in tears to her lover of sixty-four on the anniversary of an attachment that had persisted with an amazing licentiousness—and that, no less amazingly, had stayed their secret—for thirteen years. But now with hormonal infusions ebbing, with the prostate enlarging, with probably no more than another few years of semi-dependable potency still his—with perhaps not that much more life remaining—here at the approach of the end of everything, he was being charged, on pain of losing her, to turn himself inside out.”

Rita Rudner’s Guide to Men (1994)

Rudner continued with this parenthetical clarification: “(I forgot to mention, this is a guide to heterosexual men, because these are the men who give women the most trouble.)“

“Our Sexual Ethics“ (1936); reprinted in Why I Am Not a Christian (1957)

A simple assertion, crafted skillfully by a talented writer, can be a most effective way to begin an essay, as Russell demonstrates here. When I first read these opening words as a young man in the 1960s, my first reaction was, “How little things have changed.” And now, almost ninety years after Russell first penned the words, my reaction is exactly the same.

In his essay, Russell continued: “Homicide, pestilence, insanity, gold and precious stones—all the things, in fact, that are the objects of passionate hopes or fears—have been seen, in the past, through a mist of magic or mythology; but the sun of reason has now dispelled the mist, except here and there. The densest cloud that remains is in the territory of sex, as is perhaps natural since sex is concerned in the most passionate part of people’s lives.“

Chance Meetings: A Memoir (1978)

I love a memoir that begins with a “Big Picture” generalization, and they don’t get much better than this one. The idea that parents and children are strangers to each other when they first meet after birth was a totally novel idea to me when I first read it, and, apparently, the idea of these chance meetings was also extremely important to Saroyan. Writing in the Reference Guide to Short Fiction (1994), John C. Waldmeir wrote: “One could argue that this single realization has motivated his entire career.”

The Fur Person (1957)

These are the opening words of a charming novel inspired by Sarton’s own cat, Tom Jones. In a 2015 “Conscious Cat” blog post, writer and cat lover Ingrid King hailed the The Fur Person as “one of the most endearing cat stories I’ve ever read.” About the book, King added: “This little book captures the essence of what a cat is all about in the beautiful prose of this gifted and sensitive writer and poet.”

And, speaking of beautiful prose, Sarton’s novel contains one of my favorite examples of the literary device known as chiasmus:

“A Fur Person is a cat who had decided to stay with people as long as he lives. This can only happen if a human being has imagined a part of himself into a cat just as the cat has imagined part of himself into a human being.“

For more information on chiasmus, go here.

As We Are Now (1973)

This simple but powerful opening line comes from Caroline “Caro” Spencer, a 76-year-old retired schoolteacher who, after a recent heart attack, has been dumped into a private retirement home by her 80-year-old brother. Although she is physically frail, she is mentally strong, and she decides to keep a journal to document her experiences. From the very first sentence, it is clear that she has a gift for articulating her despairing situation in the most compelling—and often the most eloquent—ways.

In the opening paragraph, Spencer continued: “I make this statement to give me courage. To give you an idea what I mean by courage, suffice it to say that it has taken two weeks for me to obtain this notebook and a pen. I am in a concentration camp for the old, a place where people dump their parents or relatives exactly as though it were an ash can.”

In a Boston Globe review, Margaret Manning wrote: “May Sarton has never been better than she is in this beautiful, harrowing novel about being old, unwanted, yet refusing to give up.” A moment later, Manning added: “The problems of old age have been detailed by sociologists but only a novel as searching and deeply felt as this one can bring them so close to the bone.“

Peoplemaking (1972)

After the publication of Conjoint Family Therapy (1964), a graduate school textbook, Satir became one of her era’s most respected family therapists. In the opening words to Peoplemaking, her first psychology work aimed at a popular audience, she found an intriguing way of suggesting that her interest in family dynamics started very early in her life. In the opening paragraph, she continued: “I didn’t quite know what it was I would look for, but even then I realized that there was a lot going on in families that didn’t meet the eye.”

In the book’s second paragraph, Satir offered one of her most famous observations: “Family life is something like an iceberg. Most people are aware of only about one-tenth of what is actually going on—the tenth that they can see and hear—and often think that is all there is.”

“My Chivalric Fiasco” in Harper’s Magazine (September 2011)

Uses for Boys (2013)

In “7 Ways to Seduce Your Reader,” a 2014 article in the Hunger Mountain Review, Miciah Bay Gault wrote that these opening words are going to “set us up for the heartbreak that surely follows.”

Gault also viewed this as an opening worthy of emulation by aspiring writers, writing: “The tender relationship between mother and daughter is beautifully sketched, and the future trouble, the coming heartbreak, is foreshadowed by mention of later stepbrothers and stepfathers. As in life, we prefer hearing about a heartbreak to having one. Let your reader know there’s trouble ahead and she’ll hang around to hear about it.”

The Sophie Horowitz Story (1984)

The narrator and protagonist, Sophie Horowitz, opens with this deliciously ambiguous line, and then continues: “Glancing over the meat and poultry case at Key Food, nothing spoke to the sweetness of that woman. Maybe fresh pears stewed in brandy with orange chocolate sauce. ’Mmmm,’ I sighed out loud. ’You too baby,’ winked the stock boy over by the Campbell’s soup. Every other weekend for ten months now, she’s been coming down on the Friday night express from Boston to wrap her legs around me.”

In 2005, Time magazine included The Sophie Horowitz Story on its list of the 100 best English-language novels since 1923.

After Delores (1988)

This enigmatic opening immediately suggests a range of possibilities. Is Delores someone from the distant past? Someone who recently died? Or maybe an ex-lover? The opening words also establish the “voice” of the narrator—who was nicely described by Kinky Friedman in a glowing New York Times review:

“The heroine in After Delores is not a professional sleuth. Nor is she the typical lighthearted cocky amateur. She’s a tortured, trouble soul who mesmerizes and repels us, sometimes managing to do both at the same time.”

In his review, Friedman also opined memorably about the novel’s title character: “As for Delores, everyone knows her. She is someone unworthy of your love who breaks your heart. Ms. Schulman’s portrayal of her is painfully and indelibly drawn.”

Love Story (1970)

The novel opens on a dramatic note with a powerful rhetorical question posed by Oliver Barrett IV, a Harvard graduate and heir to a huge family fortune. Against his family’s wishes, Barrett has decided to marry Jennifer Cavilleri, the daughter of a Rhode Island baker. In the second paragraph Oliver answers the question:

“That she was beautiful. And brilliant. That she loved Mozart and Bach. And the Beatles. And me. Once, when she specifically lumped me with those musical types, I asked her what the order was, and she replied, smiling, ’Alphabetical.’”

Originally written as a screenplay before he decided to also turn it into a novel, Love Story went on to become the top-selling novel of 1970. It also became one of the highest-grossing films of all time, with an Oscar-winning performance by Ali McGraw, and an Oscar-nominated one by Ryan O’Neal.

The Inventors: A Memoir (2016)

This opening paragraph comes from the memoir’s Prologue, and nicely helped to explain why Selgin titled the memoir as he did. He continued in an equally intriguing manner in the second paragraph: “They invented themselves, too. The first man did so through an act of omission, by denying his past. The second did so through a series of fabrications, by lying about his. The first man was Paul Joseph Selgin, my father—who, it so happens, was an inventor. The second was my eighth-grade English teacher.”

And just to make sure we grasped the central theme of his book, Selgin continued in the third paragraph: I’ve had other inventors, too: a mother, my twin brother, the places I’ve lived, the people I’ve known. They all helped invent me.”

“What Bobby McIlvaine Left Behind,” in The Atlantic (September 2021)

Senior’s article article about the Mcilvane family’s search for meaning in the two decades after his death on 9/11 begins with this remarkable metaphorical description of a cluttered, overflowing desk top. In the opening paragraph, Senior continued:

“He’d kept the diaries since he was a teenager, and they were filled with the usual diary things— longings, observations, frustrations—while the legal pads were marbled with more variety: aphoristic musings, quotes that spoke to him, stabs at fiction.”

Senior’s article won a 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing.

Relative Humidity (to be published Jan. 26, 2023)

I’m a big fan of Laurence Shames and a great admirer of his opening lines. The opener of Relative Humidity, his most recent work, is like a combination punch in boxing—first the set-up, then the sting. When I asked Shames if there was a backstory behind the opener, he replied:

“I’ve always enjoyed playing around with the conventions of the mystery novel, turning them upside-down or inside-out whenever possible. In this opening, I wanted to do the complete opposite of the grab-the-reader-by-the-throat first beat. I wanted it to be as quiet as possible—though, of course, if the narrative stayed ‘calm and peaceful’ there would be no book, as every reader of commercial fiction already knows. So the zinger, while inevitable, is meant as a payoff for the reader’s patience and as reassurance that the mayhem will soon begin.”

“Hipster Megachurch in Shambles Over Pastor’s Alleged Affair,” in The Daily Beast (Jan. 21, 2022)

This was the “Lede of the Week” in The Sunday Long Read on Jan 30, 2022. In the article’s second paragraph, Shugerman continued: “The charismatic 41-year-old hurriedly explained that the two of them had been making chili and hot dogs and gotten food on their clothes, according to one volunteer who was present. But, as the volunteer put it, “I don’t think none of us was that dumb.”

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958)

The narrator continued: “With eleven pints of beer and seven small gins playing hide-and-seek inside his stomach, he fell from the top-most stair to the bottom.”

Mother-Daughter Murder Night (2023)

The body, we will shortly learn, is a dead walrus, but the opening line has done its job—it gets our attention and makes it impossible not to read on.

The Autobiography of Upton Sinclair (1962)

Sinclair continued: “Yet there it is in my mind: a room where I have been left in the care of a relative while my parents are taking a trip. I see a little old lady, black-clad, in a curtained room; I know where the bed is located, and the oil-stove on which the cooking is done, and the thrills of exploring a new place. Be sure that children know far more than we give them credit for; I hear fond parents praising their precious darlings, and I wince, noting how the darlings are drinking in every word. Always in my childhood I would think: ‘How silly these grownups are! And how easy to outwit!’”

Eligible (2016)

Eligible was the fourth volume in “The Austen Project,” a bold literary initiative in which executives at HarperCollins asked a number of contemporary authors to write “a modern retelling” of classic Jane Austen novels.

As soon as Austen fans learned that Sittenfeld was writing a modern version of Pride and Prejudice, they began wondering how she would update the story—and, more specifically, how she would tweak the classic opening line: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”

Sittenfeld’s novel was published to mixed reviews, with Michiko Kakutani writing in a New York Times review: “Eligible swiftly devolves into the glibbest sort of chick lit.” People magazine, by contrast, selected it as their “Book of the Week” and gushingly proclaimed: “Sittenfeld modernizes the classic in such a stylish, witty way you’d guess even Jane Austen would be pleased.”

In the opening paragraph, the narrator continued: “Two years earlier, Chip—graduate of Dartmouth College and Harvard Medical School, scion of the Pennsylvania Bingleys, who in the twentieth century had made their fortune in plumbing fixtures—had, ostensibly with some reluctance, appeared on the juggernaut reality-television show Eligible.”

Somebody to Love? A Rock-and-Roll Memoir (1998)

Slick, one of the most audacious stage performers in Rock-and-Roll history, continued in her memoir’s second paragraph: “I look directly at him and say, ‘Hey—I don’t even wear underpants.’ I pull my skirt up over my head for a beaver shot, and the audience explodes with laughter. I can hear the guys in the band behind me muttering, ‘Oh, Jesus.’”

The Violin Conspiracy (2022)

Unexpected juxtapositions are a staple of great opening lines, and the co-mingling of an earth-shattering day with a routine room service order is clearly designed to get our attention. The subsequent details about the food preferences of the couple we’re about to meet also pique our curiosity.

In the novel’s second paragraph, the narrator continued with an insight about a predictable thought process that occurs when people try to make sense out of an event that has shaken their world: “Later, he would try to second-guess those choices and a thousand others that, in hindsight, vibrated in his memory: What if he’d ordered French toast instead of eggs? What if grapefruit juice instead of orange? What if no juice at all?”

Ray McMillan, we will shortly learn, is a black classical violinist who has risen to the world stage after growing up on the edge of poverty in rural North Carolina. As a young child, after taking an interest in fiddle-playing, his grandmother gave him a decrepit and dilapidated old violin that belonged to his great-great-great grandfather, a former enslaved person (the violin, buried in an upstairs attic for decades, was given to “PopPop” as a gift by his former “owner” when he achieved freedom). The violin turns out to be a Stradivarius—but that’s only the beginning of what is essentially a literary trifecta: an exceptional mystery/thriller, a frank exploration of the powerful role still played by systematic racism, and an in-depth portrayal of the world of classical music that brings to mind what The Queen’s Gambit did for the world of championship chess (see the Walter Tevis entry entry for the opening words of that fine novel).

The Violin Conspiracy is the spectacular debut novel for Slocumb, who clearly built upon his own experiences as a young, black musical prodigy growing up in Fayetteville, North Carolina. In a New York Times review, Joshua Barone described the novel as “a musical bildungsroman cleverly contained within a literary thriller.”

I Capture The Castle (1949)

In 2012, The Guardian’s Robert McCrum called this one of “The 10 Best First Lines in Fiction,” writing about it: “A brilliant beginning to a much-loved English classic.” Around the same time, British Journalist Liz Jones also wrote admiringly about the line, saying in a Stylist.com article: “The opening sentence of this book is so unexpected: intimate, awkward, throwaway, as heroine Cassandra Mortmain, aged 17, begins her diary of her impoverished if glamorous life in a ruined castle.”

The Hundred and One Dalmatians (1956)

The novel gets off to a great start with these opening lines, but it begins to soar when the narrator continues:

“They understood quite a number of barks: the barks for ‘Out, please!’ ‘In, please!’ ‘Hurry up with my dinner’ and ‘What about a walk?’ And even when they could not understand, they could often guess—if looked at soulfully or scratched by an eager paw. Like many other much-loved humans, they believed that they owned their dogs, instead of realizing that their dogs owned them. Pongo and Missis found this touching and amusing and let their pets think it was true.”

At some point, I’ll be featuring this in a post on “20 of the Best Opening Lines from Animal Narrators and Protagonists.” If you’d like to nominate any candidates, let me know.

The Septembers of Shiraz (2007)

Man of My Time (2020)

Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things (1971)

Great opening lines often create a sense of heightened expectation, and there are few that rival this one—which prompted Colin Falconer to write in a 2013 blog post (“The Best 43 Opening Lines in Novel Writing History”): “Yes, yes, yes! What if?”

My Beloved World (2013)

These words come from the Prologue to the book, and they raise questions that cry out to be answered: What was it like to grow up with parents whose screaming arguments were so frequent they were described as routine? What was new about the substance of this latest argument? And why did it become so indelibly etched in Justice Sotomayor’s memory?

Candy (1958)

In an unusual writing arrangement, Southern and Hoffenberg wrote the book in tandem, mailing the chapters back and forth to each other as they finished them. The end result was a delightful parody of both Pascal’s Candide and smutty American novels. The book was originally published in France in 1958 by Olympia Press, a popular publisher of smutty books. It was released to great acclaim in America in 1964, with William Styron calling it “a droll little sugarplum of a tale” in The New York Review of Books. Sixty years later, in a 2018 New York Times piece, Dwight Garner wrote that the book hadn’t become dated, even in the “Me, Too” era. He also offered this delightful assessment of the novel’s soaring quality: “Every sentence in Candy seems to have a little propeller on it.”

In the opening paragraph above, the authors captured the profound effect a rapt audience can have on a lecturing professor—or any kind of speaker, for that matter. The narrator went on: “A grave nod of his magnificent head, and he continued: ‘Yes, and in my time I’ve traveled widely. They say travel broadens one—and I’ve…no doubt that it does.’ Here he pretended to drop some of his lecture notes and, in retrieving them, showed his backside to the class, which laughed appreciatively.”

Dear John (2006)

The novel immediately draws us in by posing what has to be one of the most important questions of all time. The first sentence is also the entire first paragraph, and just as we begin formulating our own answers to the question, the narrator begins the second paragrough with a thought of his own:

“There was a time in my life when I thought I knew the answer.“

On their own, the two sentences tell a sad, even heartbreaking, story about two people who once loved each other dearly, but are no longer together. And we deduce from the book’s title that, somewhere along the line, the woman ended it with a “Dear John” letter. We’re only two sentences in, and I’m already along for the ride.

Crossing to Safety (1987)

Writer Terry Tempest Williams described Crossing to Safety as “a quiet novel,” and I would describe the opening words as quietly seductive. I especially admired the simile about regaining vision after eye surgery as akin to a trout thrashing upward and breaking through a water’s surface. The narrator continued with an eloquent observation that will surely resonate with patients recovering from this most delicate surgical procedure:

“Cataract sufferers must see like this when the bandages are removed after the operation; every detail as sharp as if seen for the first time, yet familiar too, known from before the time of blindness, the remembered and the seen coalescing as in a stereoscope.”

Raven Stole the Moon (1998)

The narrator is describing Jenna Rosen, a Seattle woman who has been distraught since the mysterious disappearance of her 5-year-old son Bobby two years ago. The narrator continued: “She opened her eyes and looked up. She thought about opening her mouth and taking a big breath of water. That would do it. Fill those lungs with something other than oxygen. But she didn’t. She lifted her head out of the water and took a breath of air instead.”

The Art of Racing in the Rain (2008)

This candid declaration comes from Enzo, an aging Golden Retriever who from early life has felt like a human trapped in a dog’s body (he was masterfully “voiced” by Kevin Costner in a 2019 film adaptation). As Enzo approaches the end of life, he is heartened by a belief that, after death, he will be reincarnated as a human being.

Enzo went on to complete his opening thought this way: “I have no words I can rely on because, much to my dismay, my tongue was designed long and flat and loose, and therefore, is a horribly ineffective tool for pushing food around my mouth while chewing, and an even less effective tool for making clever and complicated polysyllabic sounds that can be linked together to form sentences.”

At some point, I’ll be featuring this in a post on “20 of the Best Opening Lines from Animal Narrators and Protagonists.” If you’d like to nominate any candidates, let me know.

Man at the Helm (2014)

This is an intriguing beginning to Stibbe’s debut novel, and the highly suggestive element at the end keeps us reading. As we move into the second paragraph, things quickly shift into a higher gear as the narrator—an engagingly precocious nine-year-old named Lizzie Vogel—says: “The following morning she took a pan of eggs from the lit stove and flung it over our father as he sat behind his paper at the breakfast table.”

After that, we’re off to the races in a highly acclaimed novel that was shortlisted for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction. In a New York Times review, John Williams wrote: “Ms. Stibbe’s writerly charms and her sneakily deep observations about romantic connection are on display throughout.” He went on to add that the novel “is densely peppered with funny lines, but even more striking is the sustained energy of the writing. In almost all the space between jokes, there remains a witty atmosphere, a playful effect sentence by sentence.”

Olive Kitteridge (2008)

If one of the central purposes of an opening paragraph is to set the tone of a novel, this one does the job nicely, taking readers on a sensory journey as retired pharmacist Henry Kitteredge recalls the sights, sounds, and even the smells of his daily commute to his store in the small coastal town of Crosby, Maine. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2009, and was adapted into a popular HBO mini-series in 2014.

The Liars of Nature and the Nature of Liars: Cheating and Deception in the Living World (2023)

These are the dramatic opening words of one of the best opening paragraphs of the year, and they come not from a novel, but a work of nonfiction. The author, a professor of biology at Central Washington University in Ellensburg, Washington, continued:

“She scouts around and spots a cozy house in a quiet neighborhood. The young wife of the family looks caring and has just given birth to a new baby, so is a perfect choice as a surrogate. She hides herself and waits in the vicinity, keeping watch on the house. Opportunity presents itself when the new mother takes a short trip to get some food. She sneaks in and switches the baby with her own. Then she heartlessly throws the victim’s infant in a dump.”

After describing this scenario as “a cold-blooded murder case,” Dr. Sun went on to clarify that the perpetrator of the crime is a female cuckoo bird who has snuck her own fertilized egg into the nest of a female warbler.

Publishers Weekly described Sun’s book as “an eye-opening take on lying in the natural word,” adding that “The smart parallels between human and animals make for an insightful outing.” I was also delighted to include the opening paragraphs of the book in my annual Smerconish.com compilation of “23 of the Best Opening Lines of 2023” (see the full list here).

An Open Secret: The Family Story of Robert and John Gregg Allerton (2021)

In a Chicago Tribune book review (June 18, 2021), Darcel Rockett wrote: “The first lines of Nicholas Syrett’s third book…had me hooked.” In the book, Syrett chronicled a fascinating story in gay and lesbian history—how a man who was once described as the “richest bachelor in Chicago” adopted his longtime lover, a man 26 years his junior (it was the first such adoption in Illinois history). The two men had been closeted lovers for nearly forty years, and the adoption—occurring during a time of rampant homophobia—gave Allerton a socially acceptable way to leave his fortune to his lover after his death. With a legal “son” as heir, the chances of any challenges to the will were greatly reduced.

“Monster,” in Reckless in Texas: Metroplex Mysteries, Vol. 2 (2023; Barb Goffman, ed.)

Oxymoronic first sentences are always a good way to begin a story, and this one is particularly enticing.

My Absolute Darling (2017)

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

“Decay, neglect, toxicity and menace. All of these qualities delivered in the opening line tell us that this is not going to be a cheerful tale. And indeed it is a harrowing story, but hidden in that line are roses, fragile and climbing, perhaps looking to escape but trapped by poison? What kind of people live in such a house?”

In the novel’s opening paragraph, the narrator continued: “Rose runners have prized off clapboards that now hang snarled in the canes. The gravel drive is littered with spent casings caked in verdigris. Martin Alveston gets out of the truck and does not look back at Turtle sitting in the cab but walks up the porch, his jungle boots sounding hollowly on the boards, a big man in flannel and Levi’s opening the sliding glass doors. Turtle waits, listening to the engine’s ticking, and then she follows him.”

Tallent’s debut novel became an immediate bestseller and was ultimately named one of the best books of the year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, USA Today, and Amazon.com. About the book, Stephen King wrote : “The word ’masterpiece’ has been cheapened by too many blurbs, but My Absolute Darling absolutely is one.”

The Joy Luck Club (1989)

The Kitchen God’s Wife (1991)

The Hundred Secret Senses (1995)

What exactly are yin eyes? Why are they important? And what role will they play in the story about to unfold. The narrator is Olivia Laguni, an American-born, half-Chinese girl who has long struggled with a half-sister who was born in China and has long been a source of embarrassment and consternation. Olivia continues about her sister: “She sees those who have died and now dwell in the World of Yin, ghosts who leave the mists just to visit her kitchen on Balboa Street in San Francisco.”

The Valley of Amazement (2013)

The opening words of a novel are so important to Tan that she said in a 2017 Daily Beast interview that they are “the last thing that gets written.” She explained: “Only when I finish the book can I go back to the beginning and write in the voice of all that happened. For books I want to keep reading, it’s definitely the voice. It must be a voice I’ve never heard before, and it must have its own particular intelligence. By ’voice,’ I don’t mean vernacular. It has to have its own particular history and world that it inhabits. I mean an understanding of how events happen in the world, whether it was the result of simply growing up, or accidents, or bad choices, good choices. That becomes evident in the beginning.”

The Magnificent Ambersons (1918)

The Queen’s Gambit (1983)

These opening words introduce Elizabeth Harmon, a precocious 8-year-old girl whose life has been shattered at an early age. About her, the narrator continued: “The next day her picture appeared in the Herald-Leader. The photograph, taken on the porch of the gray house on Maplewood Drive showed Beth in a simple cotton frock. Even then, she was clearly plain. A legend under the picture read: ’Orphaned by yesterday’s pile-up on New Circle Road, Elizabeth Harmon surveys a troubled future. Elizabeth, eight, was left without family by the crash, which killed two and injured others. At home alone at the time, Elizabeth learned of the accident shortly before the photo was taken. She will be well looked after, authorities say.’“

Beth’s incredible story—from heavily tranquilized resident of a school for orphan girls to World Chess Champion—was in danger of being completely forgotten when, in 2019, Netflix decided to produce a seven-episode series based on the novel. In the month after its 2020 launch, it became a smash hit, attracting well over sixty million viewers. It put Tevis’s 1983 book on the 2020 bestseller lists—and also reminded readers of some of his other classic works.

The Luck of Barry Lyndon (1844)

“His Winning Season: The Story of Pat Conroy, the real ‘Great Santini’ and The Citadel Basketball Team’s Remarkable Run,” in ESPN.com (March 2009)

These are the gripping opening words of Thompson’s article on the horrific domestic abuse suffered by writer Pat Conroy at the hands of his father, later to be immortalized as “The Great Santini” (for the opening words of the 1976 novel The Great Santini, go here). In the article, Thompson—a senior writer at ESPN—continued:

“Pat’s first childhood memory is of sitting in a high chair watching his mother try to kill his father with a kitchen knife and then his dad laughing while beating her to the floor. There was only one place during the long night of Pat’s childhood where his father’s fury couldn’t touch him. He felt safe on the basketball court.”

Self-Portrait (1979; with Mickey Herskowitz)

Tierney, one of the most beautiful Leading Ladies in Hollywood history, opens her memoir with a compelling description of perhaps the worst day of her life—standing on a window ledge and feeling no fear as she considers leaping to her death fourteen floors below. In the following paragraph, she continued:

“I wasn’t at all certain I wanted to take my own life. I cat-walked a few steps away from the open window and steadied myself, to think about it. The fact that I could no longer make decisions was why I had gone to the ledge in the first place. What to wear, when to get out of bed, which can of soup to buy, how to go on living, the most automatic task confused and depressed me.”

Anna Karenina (1877)

This legendary opening line came to the attention of Western readers in a 1901 English translation of the novel by Constance Garnett (another popular translation is: “All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”). The narrator continued in the second paragraph:

“Everything was in confusion in the Oblonsky’s house. The wife had discovered that the husband was carrying on an intrigue with a French girl, who had been a governess in their family, and she had announced to her husband that she could not go on living in the same house with him. This position of affairs had now lasted two days, and not only the husband and wife, but all the members of their family and the household, were painfully conscious of it.”

In the Foreword to a 1939 edition of the novel, Thomas Mann shared what he described as “a marvelously pretty little anecdote” about the writing of Anna Karenina. Tolstoy, according to Mann, originally intended to begin the novel with the “Everything was in confusion” paragraph. After reading an Alexander Pushkin short story, however, he decided it didn’t work as well as he would have liked and he replaced it with the now-legendary opening line.

Mann didn’t go into any detail about how it all transpired, simply saying in an understated way: “The present beginning, the aperçu about happy and unhappy families, was introduced later.” I’m still trying to learn more about the inspiration for the “happy families” opening, but so far have not been successful. If you have something to add to the discussion, please write me.

Cane (1923)

This is one of the darkest and most disturbing opening lines ever written, and it doesn’t ease up in any way as the narrator continued:

“Old men rode her hobby-horse upon their knees. Young men danced with her at frolics when they should have been dancing with their grown-up girls. God grant us youth, secretly prayed the old men. The young fellows counted the time to pass before she would be old enough to mate with them. This interest of the male, who wishes to ripen a growing thing too soon, could mean no good to her.”

Toomer is not especially well remembered by modern readers, but he was one of the leading figures in that great explosion of creativity known as the Harlem Renaissance. Not long after Toomer’s debut novel was published, the American sociologist Charles S. Johnson described it as “the most astonishingly brilliant beginning of any Negro writer of his generation.” Cane was Toomer’s first novel—and his last. For the remainder of his life, until his death at age 72 in 1967, he continued to write poetry, short stories, and essays, but no more novels.

Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir (2020)

The winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the former U. S. Poet Laureate (2012-13), Trethewey brings her exceptional talent to the world of memoir in a moving work that begins with a haunting, understated reference to a crime—the brutal murder of her mother by her former stepfather.

In a Washington Post review, Lisa Page wrote: “We know from the first page of this riveting memoir that poet Natasha Trethewey’s mother is dead.” A few moments later, she went on to write: “Trethewey excavates her mother’s life, transforming her from tragic victim to luminous human being.”

Nina Balatka (1867)

In a 2016 Electric Literature essay on the “secret history” of first sentences, Andrew Heisel reported that the opening line of Nina Balatka was hailed by critics as soon as the book was published. One reviewer from the Aberdeen Journal said no reader could read the sentence “without being captivated with the beauty of its style and led unresistingly on to read the whole of it.”

Heisel, the editor of the Yale Review at the time, also wrote enthusiastically about the line: “The sentence doesn’t just plunk you into the middle of something; it presents a problem, a paradox, a mystery. The reader…has no choice but to follow the narrator and answer the question of just how Nina found herself in this curious situation.”

Linda Tressel (1868)

The idea of virtue without common sense and mercy makes for an intriguing opening—and in this case it immediately makes us wonder what specific virtue has been responsible for all the trouble.

The Eustace Diamonds (1873)

This is a most interesting way of introducing the novel’s protagonist and describing her success in life. In a 2016 post on NovelSpaces.com, mystery author Susan Oleksiw featured this first sentence and said about it: “We surmise that Lizzie has risen above her station, and not everyone approves of her or how she’s achieved this.”

As the first paragraph of the novel continues, it becomes clear that the narrator is in the disapproval camp: “We will tell the story of Lizzie Greystock from the beginning, but we will not dwell over it at great length as we might do if we loved her.”

Presumed Innocent [book 1 of Kindle County Series] (1987)

In these four short opening paragraphs, readers are introduced to Rusty Sabich, an assistant prosecuting attorney in Kindle County, a fictional county that feels a whole lot like Illinois’s Cook County. In the novel, Sabich continued:

“You must always point, Rusty, I was told by John White. That was the day I started in the office. The sheriff took my fingerprints, the chief judge swore me in, and John White brought me up to watch the first jury trial I’d ever seen. Ned Halsey was making the opening statement for the state, and as he gestured across the courtroom, John, in his generous avuncular way, with the humid scent of alcohol on his breath at ten in the morning, whispered my initial lesson. He was the chief deputy P.A. then, a half Irishman with white hair wild as cornsilk. It was almost a dozen years ago, long before I had formed even the most secret ambition to hold John’s job myself. If you don’t have the courage to point, John White whispered, you can’t expect them to have the courage to convict.”

Ordinary Heroes (2005)

In 2006, when Turow was asked by NPR’s Maureen Pao if he had a favorite sentence, he identified the first sentence of this opening paragraph, saying, “It’s the first line of the narrative in my seventh novel, Ordinary Heroes, and it reverberates on almost every page that follows.”

“Extracts From Adam’s Diary” in The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg and Other Stories and Sketches (1900)

Because we know the title of the short story, we immediately deduce the identity of the new creature. And since Eve has been only recently created, there is no female pronoun for Adam to use. She is most certainly not a “he,“ so he uses the only available option: “It.“ And then, in what I regard as one of Twain’s most brilliant lines, Adam provides a hint about how his world is unalterably changing: “Cloudy today, wind in the east; think we shall have rain….We? Where did I get that word?—I remember now—the new creature uses it.”

Celestial Navigation (1974)

Earthly Possessions (1977)

These simple-but-powerful opening words come from thirty-five-year old Charlotte Emory, a Maryland wife and mother who is stuck in an unsatisfying marriage to her husband, a local preacher. She continued: “This was on a Wednesday, a rainy afternoon in March. The streets were nearly empty and the bank had just a few customers, none of them familiar to me.”

Based on these opening words, we’re already “into” the tale, but what we don’t know at the moment is that the story is about to abruptly change direction. While waiting in line to make a withdrawal, a recent prison escapee puts his arm around her neck and hollers out, “Anybody move and I’ll kill her.“ As the bank robbery ends, Charlotte is dragged out of the bank by the ex-con and the highly unusual hostage drama unfolds.

In 1999, the film was adapted into an HBO movie starring Susan Sarandon, Stephen Dorff, and Elisabeth Moss.

A Patchwork Planet (1998)

Notice how the narrator—a 30-year-old misfit named Barnaby Gaitlin—qualifies his I’m a man you can trust statement by adding the caveat that it is his customers who view him as trustworthy. After that first line, there is a clear suggestion that such trust may be misplaced. In the opening paragraph, Gaitlin continued: “Or at least, I’m guessing it is. Why else would they hand me their house keys before they leave for vacation?”

Back When We Were Grownups (2001)

John Updike, a great admirer of Tyler’s work, once said that she wasn’t merely good, but “wickedly good,” and that’s the way I’d describe this first sentence. In her impressive opener, Tyler neatly pairs history’s most famous opening words—once upon a time—with modern notions of identity and authenticity. It’s clear from the outset that this will be no simple fairy tale.

In a 2019 Considerable.com article, Ruthie Darling included Tyler’s opener in her article of “150 of the Most Compelling Opening Lines in Literature.” “Whatever you’re reading,” Darling wrote, “Sometimes you need to be grabbed right out of the gate, and drawn into the world of the novel.”

Noah’s Compass (2009)

In a 2009 review of the novel in The Guardian, Elizabeth Day offered an overall assessment of Tyler that also applies perfectly to this masterful opening paragraph:

“Anne Tyler is a novelist who has elevated the pitch-perfect observation of everyday detail into an art form. There are moments in her 18th novel, Noah’s Compass, where her prose is so unassuming, so exact in the placement of each word, that it is easy to let it glide over you like an overheard conversation, failing to realize quite how brilliantly it is executed.“

The Beginner’s Goodbye (2012)

The jarring opening words come from protagonist Aaron Woolcott, a thirty-five-year old book editor whose wife Dorothy died several months earlier in a freakish household accident. In a Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel review, writer and lawyer Mike Fisher described the first sentence as “delightfully quirky,” and I can’t imagine a better description. About the novel, Fisher went on to add: “What’s best about Goodbye is what its opening sentence had promised to deliver: An exploration of the awkward and often poignant dance between the living and the dead.“

Confessions on the 7:45 (2020)

Some opening lines succeed because they introduce a new or unfamiliar concept—like liminal spaces—and then fully exploit it to launch a story. The narrator continued about Selena Murphy, a Manhattan literary agent: “She missed the 5:40 train because her client meeting ran long, knowing before she even left the conference room table that there was no way she would be home in time for dinner with her husband Graham and their two maniac boys, Stephen and Oliver.”

With the next train scheduled to leave at 7:45, Selena returned to her office, opened her computer, and began to examine the video feed of a nanny cam she had recently installed in her children’s playroom. Normally, as the novel’s opening line suggests, Selena loved the liminal spaces in her life, but not this one.

Last Girl Ghosted (2021)

The opening words of the first chapter come from narrator and protagonist Wren Greenwood, a Manhattan advice columnist who is in a crowded East Village bar waiting to meet a man she has recently communicated with on a dating app. In the novel’s second paragraph, she reflects: “Is there anything more awkward, more nervous-making than waiting for a person you’ve only seen online to show up in the flesh.”

As soon as she sees hunky Adam Harper walk in the front door, she experiences an unexpected sensation (“Something that has been dormant within me awakens,” she writes). And then, after quickly falling for a man she hardly knows, she is ghosted, and so begins what New York Times reviewer Sarah Lyall described as “A five-alarm fire of a situation.”

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

The narrator continued with an unsettling observation about the relationship between this father and son: “The sensation chills him, above and beyond the terminal air-conditioning. But, then, facing Nelson has made him feel uneasy for thirty years.” Rabbit at Rest is regarded as one of Updike’s finest novels. After winning the 1990 National Book Critics Circle Award, it went on to win the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

“Vision Out of the Corner of One Eye,” in The Censors (1992)

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 in particular, he wrote:

“We see a scene in which a man has taken an obviously crude, if not criminal, action; and then, immediately, we see he has another side to him that we didn’t expect. We know we’re in the company of a couple of pretty unusual, interesting, and complex characters, and that something we haven’t seen before is about to happen. Actually, it’s in the middle of happening. An arresting image like Valenzuela has provided here is guaranteed to spark reader interest.”

Steel Beach (1992)

The Sci-Fi world has seen many great opening lines over the years, and this is one of the very best. I can’t imagine anyone reading it for the first time and declining to read further.

The Covenant of Water (2023)

This dramatic first sentence may be offensive to modern sensibilities, but it reminds readers of a sad reality: throughout history, many brides were pre-pubescent girls—mere children—who were getting married to men who were decades older. In the novel, the narrator continued:

“‘The saddest day of a girl’s life is the day of her wedding,’ her mother says. ‘After that, God willing, it gets better.’”

The second sentence provides a tragic human context—at a time that should be joyous for a mother and her daughter, this day has reduced both to tears.

The Covenant of Water was named one of the “100 Notable Books of 2023” by The New York Times and one of the “100 Must-Read Books of 2023” by Time magazine.

Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day (1972)

This is the opening paragraph of a classic book in children’s literature, the final line of which (a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day) has become a hugely popular meme for describing a series of serious setbacks for people, organizations, and movements.

The Big Hustle (2020)

Wahlberg, the fifth child in a Dorchester, Mass. family of nine children that included Donnie (8th) and Mark (9th), was an ex-con and former addict who finally got his life together and dedicated his life to the recovery movement. After a successful marriage that produced three wonderful children, he wasn’t prepared for the next crisis in his life. He continued: “Daniel was sixteen years old. His behavior had been off, his energy seemed low, but we attributed that to recently losing his best friend to cancer.”

Starting Over (1973)

In Wakefield’s comic exploration of sexual mores in the late 1960s, the opening paragraphs introduce Phil Potter, a recently divorced man who isn’t exactly finding it easy to start over after his marriage falls apart. In 1979, the novel was adapted into a popular film, with Burt Reynolds as Potter, Candice Bergan as his former wife Jessica, and Jill Clayburgh as the woman who ultimately becomes his second wife.

The very first sentence above is also the novel’s final sentence, leading Nancy Kress to write in Beginnings, Middles & Ends (1993): “The first paragraph congratulates Phil Potter on his divorce; the last, on his remarriage. By using the same wording for two opposite events, author Wakefield slyly points up [sic] that Potter has learned nothing, grown not at all from his experiences. He has only come full circle.”

The Color Purple (1982)

The letter writer is fourteen-year-old Celie, a poor, uneducated black girl who is living a miserable existence in rural Georgia in the early 1900s. Beaten and sexually abused by her father, she has already given birth to two children, both of whom have been taken away by her father. As the novel opens, her deep sense of hopelessness is assuaged slightly by letters she writes to God. In the letter which opens the novel, Celie’s desire to speak the complete truth is reflected in her striking out I am and changing it to I have always been a good girl.

Hailed by critics from the outset, The Color Purple went on to win the 1983 National Book Award for Fiction and the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In 1985, Steven Spielberg adapted the novel into a critically acclaimed film, with Whoopi Goldberg playing the role of Celie (and also starring Danny Glover, Oprah Winfrey, and Margaret Avery). The film received eleven Academy Award Nominations, including Best Picture, Best Actress for Goldberg, and Best Supporting Actress for both Winfrey and Avery, but ended up winning none (Goldberg did, however, win the Golden Globe Best Actress Award).

Many internet sites suggest that the opening line of the novel is, “You better not never tell nobody but God. It’d kill your mammy.” Technically, however, that is the epigraph to the opening chapter, and the novel truly opens with Celie’s letter. Indeed, Walker herself considered the letter to be the book’s opening lines, once writing: “I would have thought that a book that begins ’Dear God’ would immediately have been identified as a book about the desire to encounter, to hear from, the Ultimate Ancestor.”

Bridges of Madison County (1992)

The narrator, an unnamed Iowa writer, continued: “In late afternoon, in the autumn of 1989, I’m at my desk, looking at a blinking cursor on the computer screen before me, and the telephone rings. On the other end of the wire, is a former Iowan named Michael Johnson. He lives in Florida now. A friend from Florida has sent him one of my books. Michael Johnson has read it; his sister Carolyn has read it; and they have a story in which they think I might be interested.”

The remainder of the story is presented as fictionalized version of a true story of a married Iowa woman who—while her husband is away at the Iowa State Fair—has an affair with a National Geographic reporter who is on an assignment to photograph the county’s historic covered bridges. There was nothing at all true about the story, however; it sprang straight from Waller’s imagination a few years earlier when—on vacation from his teaching job at the University of Iowa—he was taking photographs of those same covered bridges. Waller said he wrote the novella—171 pages in all—in just eleven days.

Even though the novel was dismissed by most critics (The New York Times Book Review described it as “bodice-heaving”), it made The New York Times bestseller list the very first week it was published, quickly made it to the top position, and remained on the list for 164 consecutive weeks (yes, more than three years). It went on to sell over 60 million copies. in 1995, it was adapted into one of the year’s most popular films, starring Clint Eastwood and Meryl Streep.

Border Music (1995)

The narrator continued: “Four hours later and two hundred miles down the road, Jack bought coffee and sweet rolls in Chisolm for him and Linda. After that they headed up to Ely, then cut southeast down through the Superior National Forest. Not moving too fast, understand, Jack more or less letting the ’82 Chevy S-10 have its own way.”

High Plains Tango (2005)

The Glass Castle (2005)

This is an extraordinary opening line, all the more impressive because it is coming from a work of non-fiction. Walls, a successful journalist and gossip columnist, continued: “It was just after dark. A blustery March wind whipped the steam coming out of the manholes, and people hurried along the sidewalks with their collars turned up. I was stuck in traffic two blocks from the party where I was heading.”

The book went on to win the 2006 American Library Association’s Alex Award, an honor for books written for adults but which have special appeal to young adults.

Half Broke Horses: A True-Life Novel (2009)

About this opening line—and the heartwarming tale that follows—I cannot improve upon the publisher’s description: “So begins the story of Lily Casey Smith, Jeannette Walls’s no-nonsense, resourceful, and spectacularly compelling grandmother. By age six, Lily was helping her father break horses. At fifteen, she left home to teach in a frontier town—riding five hundred miles on her pony, alone, to get to her job. She learned to drive a car and fly a plane. And, with her husband, Jim, she ran a vast ranch in Arizona. She raised two children, one of whom is Jeannette’s memorable mother, Rosemary Smith Walls, unforgettably portrayed in [Walls’s 2008 memoir] The Glass Castle.” The New York Times named Half Broke Horses one of The Ten Best Books of 2008.

The Silver Star (2013)

The words come from 12-year-old “Bean” Holladay, who continued: “Here’s what happened. After a fight with her family, Mom decided to leave home in the middle of the night, taking us with her. I was only a few months old, so Mom put me in the infant carrier. She set it on the roof of the car while she stashed some things in the trunk, then she settled Liz, who was three, in the backseat. Mom was going through a rough period at the time and had a lot on her mind—craziness, craziness, craziness, she’d say later. Completely forgetting that she’d left me on the roof, Mom drove off.”

Judith Paris [Book 2 in The Herries Chronicles] (1931)

This simple, but compelling, first sentence is the novel’s entire first paragraph—and even though written close to a century ago, it has the feel of what is often described these days as a “hook.” In the next three paragraphs, the narrator reels the reader in:

“The old woman, Mrs. Henny, had finished her washing and laying-out of the bodies of the child’s father and of the child’s mother. She had done it alone because she had been afraid to leave the house with no one alive in it save the new-born child. Now she was exhausted and, in spite of her labor, fearfully chilled, for the snow, although it fell now more lightly, was piled high about the doors and windows as if, with its soft thick fingers, it wished to strangle the house.

“She was very cold, so she drank some gin, although it was not as a rule her weakness. The bodies of Mr. and Mrs. Herries lay, the eyes decently closed, the pale hands folded, each in its proper bed.

“A fine heat burnt through Mrs. Henny’s old body. The gin was good. Then her head fell forward and she slept.”

The clear, unsettling implication is that the baby is now being left unattended. We anxiously read on, in large part to see what will happen with the child.

Chemistry (2017)

I loved this opening line from the moment I first read it, but the truth is I had trouble articulating exactly why it was so special. And then I read Jamie Fisher’s review of the book in The Washington Post. It begins: “Weike Wang’s Chemistry is the most assured novel about indecisiveness you’ll ever read.” This was Wang’s first novel, and it went on to win the 2018 PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction.

Let us Descend (2023)

Opening lines don’t get much better—and I predict that this first sentence of Let Us Descend will be remembered many decades from now. The words come from 12-year-old Annis, the daughter of an enslaved black woman who was raped and impregnated by her white plantation slaveholder. In the opening paragraph, Annis continued:

“I was a small child then, soft at the belly. On that night, my mother woke me and led me out to the Carolina woods, deep, deep into the murmuring trees, black with the sun’s leaving. The bones in her fingers: blades in sheaths, but I did not know this yet.”

As the story unfolds, we learn that Annis’s grandmother—known as Mama Aza—was a famous female warrior in the West African nation of Dahomey (a country recently featured in the 2022 film “The Woman King,” starring Viola Davis). Sold into slavery by her husband, the king of Dahomey, for falling in love with a soldier, she ended up on a plantation in North Carolina. Mama Aza passed along her warrior training methods to her daughter, and now, Annis’s mother is about to continue the tradition, periodically going deep into the woods to train her daughter in the hand-to-hand combat skills of her ancestors.

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

The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (1983)

An unexpected twist right out of the gate is a popular strategy when crafting a novel’s opening words, and Weldon does that very effectively when she introduces her protagonist. It’s almost impossible to imagine someone reading this opener and not reading on.

“A Worn Path,” in The Atlantic Monthly (February 1941)

The best way to begin any piece of writing is to craft a beautifully-written, multi-layered first paragraph—and that is the case here with Welty’s description of an elderly black woman trudging slowly but purposefully along a wooded pathway. When I first read the story, I wondered to myself if she had chosen the name Phoenix for a reason—and, not surprisingly, it turned out to be exactly the case.

In a 2012 essay in the literary journal Soundings (titled “The Life of a Sentence”), writer Suzanne Berne highlighted the artistry and significance of the fourth sentence in particular, writing:

“The sentence’s vitality, of course, springs from the comparison between an old woman and the pendulum of a grandfather clock, a comparison built in stages, starting with the way she walks, ‘from side to side,’ to the ‘balanced heaviness and lightness’ of her steps. Perfectly weighted in that simile also rests the whole story: Phoenix Jackson is headed to town to buy medicine for her chronically ill grandson, a long journey repeated ‘as regular as clockwork’…. On her way, Phoenix surmounts obstacles, confronts monsters and outwits foes, an odyssey signaled visually, metaphorically, even structurally in nearly every sentence.”

Goodness Had Nothing to Do With It (1959)

Great openers typically come from a book’s first chapter, and occasionally from a Preface or Foreword. In this book, however, these are the first words of the “Acknowledgments” section, and in my mind and they qualify as a great opener.

The title of the book comes from West’s 1932 film Night After Night. After a woman says about the jewelry West is wearing, “Goodness, what beautiful diamonds!” she famously replied, “Goodness had nothing to do with it, dearie.”

Miss Lonelyhearts (1933)

Written decades before the arrival of Ann Landers and Dear Abby, this opening line—and especially the tantalizing phrase at his desk—has been a favorite of black comedy fans since it first appeared in the early years of the Great Depression. After the book was published, Miss Lonelyhearts became a generic term for writers of advice columns.

In Phrases and Sayings (1995), Nigel Rees also reports that the term “lonelyhearts column” was once commonly used to describe what we now call “personal ads” in English newspapers and magazines.

Help I Am Being Held Prisoner (1974)

In a 2018 review of a reissue of the book published under the Hard Case Crime imprint, Levi Stahl wrote of this opening: “Four sentences in, and Westlake is saying: I want to be clear about the kind of book this is. I intend to make you laugh, and I will even do it with a joke like this if it seems like that’s what’s needed.”

Two Much! (1975)

This is an absolute gem of an opening line. It comes from Art Dodge, a principle-challenged single guy who is (1) secretly sleeping with his best friend’s wife and (2) more than willing to lie to women if it will get him what he wants. And therein lies the plot of the story, which begins to unfold when he meets Liz Kerner, a beautiful girl who just happens to have an identical twin sister.

In the novel’s first paragraph, Art continued: “So when Candy and Ralph said we were invited to a party over in Dunewood I said fine, wait while I change. Ralph said, ‘There’ll be some singles there,’ and Candy stuck her tongue out at me behind Ralph’s back.’”

The first sentence of Two Much! has held an honored place in my personal collection for more than four decades—ever since a good friend handed me a copy of the book and, with a wide grin on his face said, “I believe I’ve just discovered the words I’m going to have inscribed on my epitaph.”

Ethan Frome (1911)

The narrator, an unnamed engineer who is visiting Starkfield, Massachusetts, is referring to stories he has heard about Ethan Frome, an intriguing village resident who presents a “striking figure” despite a marked limp from a mysterious “smash-up” suffered decades ago. In a Wonderslist.com post on “10 of the Most Powerful Opening Lines in Novels,” writer Sufia Banu ranked this opening line Number Seven.

In a 1911 review in The New York Times, the novel was described as “A cruel, compelling, haunting story of New England.” In 1993, the famed English director John Madden adapted the novel into a film of the same title, starring Liam Neeson and Patricia Arquette.

Properties of Thirst (2022)

Beginning a book with a popular modern proverb can be risky, but in this case it worked so remarkably well that I was pleased to select it as one of “The Best Opening Lines of 2022” on Smerconish.com (see the full list here).

After reading the first sentence, I stopped for a moment to think about the meaning of the saying and the foreshadowing role it would likely play in the tale to come (at the time, I had no clue that the first sentence also captured much of what had actually occurred in the author’s own life). This is one of two wonderful 2022 novels that begin with a modern proverb (see the other one from Nelson DeMille here), and both work beautifully.

In the second paragraph, the narrator continued: “—he knew that. Christ, he’d learned that from the cradle, in his father’s house, at the knee of someone whose fierce love of money poured like baptizing water over every aspect of their lives. If you want to keep a thing alive (like this business, son) you need to will it. No one ever made his fortune from the milk of human kindness. Thirst. You have to want it, have to have the perseverance, self-reliance, stamina.”

In 2016, at age 68, Wiggins had completed ninety percent of the work on the novel when she suffered a massive stroke that erased all of her memories of the previous eight years—including her writing of the novel. Unable to continue living independently, she moved in with daughter Lara Porzak, a well-known photographer, who became her full-time caregiver. After falling in love with the manuscript, Porzak reintroduced it to her mother by gently reading and re-reading it to her. As Wiggins gradually improved, the mother-daughter team worked assiduously every day for the next three years to find the right words to complete it. It’s a real-life story that reads like a novel, and much of it is detailed in “Marianne,” a new documentary film Porzak made with filmmaker Rebecca Ressler.

In a Los Angeles Times review, Lorraine Berry wrote: “‘You can’t save what you don’t love,’ reads the declarative sentence that opens the novel. It becomes the theme that ties together the disparate characters as they attempt to save the water, save the land, save their families, and ultimately save themselves. And it describes the novel that mother and daughter have saved together.”

The Woman Who Wouldn’t (2008)

The opening words come from narrator and protagonist Jeremy Webb, an Ohio violinist who is reflecting on a dramatic mental breakdown he had during a Cleveland Orchestra concert (in the middle of the performance, he tore up the first violinist’s sheet music, poured a glass of water into the mouth of a tuba, pounded the black keys of a Steinway piano with his fists, and then fell to the floor, where he began weeping).

In the novel’s second paragraph, Webb continued: “I’m thirty-three years old. In 1903 I had a nervous breakdown and was sent to a neuropsychiatric hospital wrapped in a straitjacket. How that came about is still hazy, but I’ll tell you what I remember.”

As Wilder’s legendary acting career came to a close, he showed considerable talent as a writer, penning three novels and a volume of short stories. In addition to crafting an impressive opening line for The Woman Who Wouldn’t, he not only crafted an impressive opening line, he also penned a most engaging historical novel that included, among other things, his protagonist’s developing friendship with fellow patient Anton Chekhov.

My Murder (2023)