A Celebration of
Great Opening Lines
in World Literature

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

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

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

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.

A Servant of Reality (1919)

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

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

The Lifeline (1946)

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

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

“The Army Mule is Back,” in Supthai Sentinel (August 23, 1968)

Boyd’s clever nostalgic lead began a story about how the U.S. Army and Royal Thai Army joined forces to train 140 mules to provide support to troops in remote areas of Thailand during the Vietnam conflict.

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.”

The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915)

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

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

Lincoln and the Civil War (2011)

In the opening paragraph, Burlingame continued: “As historian William Hanchett has cogently argued, ‘Contrary to the conventional assumption, the North, not the South, was the underdog in the Civil War.’”

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

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

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

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

The Cardinal of the Kremlin (1988)

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

Shōgun (1975)

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

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

The 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 Red Badge of Courage (1895)

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

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

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

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

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

Fountain Society (1999)

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

The Mandarins (1954)

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

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.

“We Are Trapped in the Madness of Powerful Individuals,” in The New York Times (Feb. 27, 2022)

In the article, published just after Vladimir’s Putin’s infamous invasion of Ukraine in February, 2022, Dowd was reminded of a number of previous “demented, destructive rides” she’d been forced to take in her lifetime. She continued: “And it always feels as though we are powerless to stop the madness of these individuals, that we are trapped in their ego or libido or id or delusion.”

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.

Casino Royale (1953)

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

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

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

Term Limits (1997)

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

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

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

The Key to Rebecca (1980)

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

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

The African Queen (1935)

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

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

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

The Beat to Quarters (1937)

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

The Outsider: My Life in Intrigue (2015)

This is a tantalizing opening sentence with a delightful dash of understatement. Forsyth straight-off confesses to making a blunder that might have started a world conflagration, and then adds: “To this day, I still maintain it was not entirely my fault. But I’m getting ahead of myself.” It’s hard to imagine a reader not wanting to read on.

Forsyth is best known as a bestselling action writer, but he also lived an action-filled life. He was once described in the Washington Post as “A writer of thrillers whose life is one, too.”

Kirkus Reviews wrote about the memoir: “Acclaimed thriller writer Forsyth delivers a charming autobiography about his real-life adventures around the globe. His tales of derring-do are a pleasure to read, especially when coupled with his self-deprecating humor, but his most endearing quality is his ravenous curiosity, which pulled him from one exotic location to another. Forsyth has seen it all. After living such an exciting life, he has earned his bragging rights.”

Cold Mountain (1997)

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

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

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

The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World (2022)

The opening paragraph reads like the first words of a suspense thriller, but they are, in fact, based on the true story of Rudolf Vrba, the first Jew to successfully escape from Auschwitz (one of only four in history). In the book’s second paragraph, Freedland continued:

“The two other prisoners were already there, at the designated spot. Wordlessly, they gave the nod: do it now. Walter and Fred did not hesitate. They climbed on top of the timbers, found the opening and, one after the other, they dropped inside. A second later, their comrades moved the planks into place above their heads. One of them whispered, ‘Bon voyage.’ And then all was dark and silent.”

Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War (1989)

Fussell continued: “Going very fast and looking as cute as Bambi, it flies into the air, and behind, the little gun bounces high off the ground on its springy tires. This graceful duo conveyed the firm impression of purposeful, resourceful intelligence going somewhere significant, and going there with speed, agility, and delicacy—almost wit.”

Brotherless Night (2023)

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

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

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

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

The Spy Coast (2023)

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

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

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

The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War (2021)

To open a book with a little known historical fact is a time-honored tradition among non-fiction authors, and for reasons I’m not sure I can easily articulate, I found something especially appealing about this opening sentence. Gladwell continued: “The Marianas are the southern end of a largely submerged mountain range—the tips of volcanoes poking up through the deep ocean waters. For most of their history, the Marianas were too small to be of much interest or use to anyone in the wider world. Until the age of airpower, when all of a sudden they took on enormous importance.”

During WWII, the Japanese controlled the entire area until the summer of 1944, when a brutal and costly series of victories by American forces brought them under Allied control. Almost immediately, U.S. Navy Seabees commenced one of the most ambitious construction projects in military history. Within a few months, American commanders had at their disposal four of the largest airports the world had ever seen, all equipped with the 8,500-foot runways that were needed to accommodate massive B-29 “Superfortress” bombers—and ultimately bring the war to an end.

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.’”

Catch-22 (1961)

Many readers were puzzled when this unspectacular opening sentence showed up on the American Book Review’s 2006 list of “The 100 Best First Lines from Novels” (it was ranked Number 59). In my view, it made the list not on its own merits, but because of the spectacular second line of the novel: “The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain he fell madly in love with him.”

While most writers do everything they can to avoid clichés—especially at the beginning of a novel—Heller was able to pull it off because he used it as a “set-up” for his inspired second line. In the ABR post, however, nothing was said about the second line, leaving many readers confounded by the inclusion of a hackneyed cliché in an article celebrating history’s best opening lines. In their compilation, the ABR editors made this mistake with some other entries as well, most notably the opening words of Sinclair Lewis’s Elmer Gantry (1927). See the Gantry entry here.

A Farewell to Arms (1929)

In an October 25, 1998 New Yorker article (titled “Last Words”), writer Joan Didion hailed these opening words, writing: “That paragraph…bears examination: four deceptively simple sentences, one-hundred and twenty-six words, the arrangement of which remains as mysterious and thrilling to me now as it did when I first read them, at twelve or thirteen, and imagined that if I studied them closely enough and practiced hard enough I might one day arrange one-hundred and twenty-six such words myself.”

Didion went on to write that the power of Hemingway’s opening paragraph also came from what he left out, what she called “deliberate omission” and “the tension of withheld information.” To make her point, she asked, “In the summer of what year? What river, what mountains, what troops?”

A Farewell to Arms came three years after The Sun Also Rises and was Hemingway’s first bestseller, firmly establishing his reputation as a major American writer. The story was based on his own experiences as an ambulance driver in the Italian campaign in WWI. After being seriously wounded, he was cared for in a Milan hospital by an American nurse named Agnes von Kurowsky, and she ultimately showed up as the character Catherine Barkley in the novel.

For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)

This simple-but-beautiful opening sentence introduces us to Robert Jordan, an American university professor who has become an anti-fascist guerilla fighter in the Spanish Civil War. Assigned to blow up a local bridge, he surveys the countryside he must traverse in order to make his way to the target.

The narrator continued: “The mountainside sloped gently where he lay; but below it was steep and he could see the dark of the oiled road winding through the pass. There was a stream alongside the road and far down the pass he saw a mill beside the stream and the falling water of the dam, white in the summer sunlight.”

The Secret Hours (2023)

This is such an unusual first sentence that it accomplishes the goal of all opening lines—it implants the hook. And the rest of the first paragraph is spent reeling the reader in:

“He’d encountered it on his morning walk down a green lane; had caught the odor without seeing the corpse, but had guessed what it was before returning later with a shovel. Whether they all smelled that bad or whether this one had expired of noxious causes he didn’t know. As it turned out, he couldn’t do anything about it either—the creature had crawled into a tangled nest of roots to die, and it would require heavy machinery and a strong stomach to recover it. Lacking the former, and not wanting to put the latter to the test, Max opted for a third way: he’d walk a different route for awhile, and see if one of the local farmers shifted it in the meantime. Which was why he wasn’t sure the badger would still be there a couple of nights later, when he was running for his life.”

“Hiroshima,“ in The New Yorker (Aug. 31, 1946)

In a 2020 NPR interview, Lesley Blume, author of Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-Up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World (2020), described this as “one of the most famous introductions in journalistic history.”

After the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings brought WWII to an end, the U.S. government released plenty of pictures of mushroom clouds and landscape devastation, but nothing about the horrifying human toll. The government’s reluctance to be transparent was captured in a remark by Henry Stimson, then U. S. Secretary of War: “I did not want to have the United States get the reputation for outdoing Hitler in atrocities”

Hersey, a respected war correspondent at the time, chose to tell his story through the experiences of six Japanese survivors of the atomic blast. His 30,000-word article took up nearly the entire August 31, 1946 issue of The New Yorker magazine. For the first time, the American public was learning about such ghastly details as melting eyeballs and people being vaporized.

The issue sold out within hours of publication, and the article was soon reprinted in newspapers around the country, unheard of at the time for a piece of such enormous length. Two months later, the article was published as a full-length book. A main selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club, it was sent free to members (the first and only time this has happened). The book is now regarded as a classic in journalism history.

The Eagle Has Landed (1975)

This is the first sentence of the book’s Prologue, and it immediately brings the reader into the heart of the story. In the novel, the narrator explained: “It meant that a small force of German paratroops were at that moment safely in England and poised to snatch the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, from the Norfolk country house near the sea, where he was spending a quiet weekend.”

From 1959 to 1974, Higgins wrote thirty-four thrillers and spy novels—some under his real name (Harry Patterson), and others under a variety of pen names. The Eagle Has Landed was his thirty-fifth book and, after exploding on the literary scene, quickly outsold all of his previous novels combined (ultimately more than fifty million copies were sold). Now regarded as a classic in the spy/thriller genre, the novel was adapted into a 1976 film starring Michael Caine, Donald Sutherland, and Robert Duvall. Directed by the legendary director John Sturges, it was the fifteenth highest-grossing film of 1977.

Many people believe Higgins authored the popular phrase the eagle has landed, but that would be a mistake. The saying first appeared on July 20, 1969, when U. S. astronaut Neal Armstrong said it about the landing of the Lunar Module Eagle on the surface of the moon.

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.

Code Name Sapphire (2023)

The novel’s opening words are quite literally filled with intrigue, and they have a film-noirish quality that is easy to visualize in the movie theaters of our minds. As the scene unfolds, we quickly learn that the man in question is an American soldier, and when the mysterious woman whispers in his ear “If you hope to live, follow me!” we eagerly go along for the ride.

Writer Patti Callahan (The Secret Book of Flora Lea) wrote about the book: “From the opening scene to the final page, Code Name Sapphire will not let you go.”

Schindler’s Ark [published in America as Schindler’s List] (1982)

The Other Side of Silence [Book 11 in the Bernie Gunther series] (2016)

These are dramatic opening words, and I believe they perfectly capture the reality of most people considering suicide: they don’t want to end their lives so much as they want to bring an end to the unbearable pain they’ve been experiencing. In this case, the pain-sufferer is Bernie Gunther, an aging former Berlin homicide detective with a dark past. As the novel begins, he is working under a false name as a concierge at a hotel in the French Riviera—and he is definitely not a happy camper. In his opening words, he continued:

“Elizabeth, my wife, left me a while ago and I’d been missing her a lot. That was one source of pain, and a pretty major one, I have to admit. Even after a war in which more than four million German soldiers died, German wives are hard to come by. But another serious pain in my life was the war itself, of course, and what happened to me way back then, and in the Soviet POW camps afterward.”

“Redeployment,“ title story of Redeployment (2014)

Tucker Max, writer and co-founder of Scribe Media, wrote about these first words: “This is the best opening to a book I’ve ever read. I’m actually a dog person, so this shocked the hell out of me. It was gripping. As you read, the sentence starts making more sense, but it stays just as shocking. And you can’t help but finish the page and the chapter to understand why. But my God, what a way to hook a reader.“

By the end of the first page, readers understand the rationale for the shootings: during the Iraq war, stray dogs were licking up blood from dead bodies, thereby giving away the position of American troops to enemy snipers. Klay’s collection of twelve short stories-—his first published book—was immediately hailed by critics, and few were surprised when it went on to win the 2014 National Book Award for Fiction.

An American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History (2012; with Scott McEwen & Jim DeFelice)

In the third paragraph of the book, Kyle continued: “I’m proud to say that I still try to live my life according to those values. I have a strong sense of justice. It’s pretty much black-and-white. I don’t see too much gray. I think it’s important to protect others. I don’t mind hard work. At the same time, I like to have fun; life’s too short not to.“

Almost immediately after it was published, the book broke into The New York Times Best-Seller list, where it remained for 37 weeks (it was later adapted into an acclaimed 2014 film, directed by Clint Eastwood and starring Bradley Cooper).

Pagan Babies (2000)

The narrator is describing a scene in war-torn Rwanda a few years after the genocide of the local Tutsi population by neighboring Hutu forces. It’s a gripping opening line, made macabre by the narrator’s continued words: “The benches had been removed and the bodies reassembled: men, women and small children laid in rows of skulls and spines, femurs, fragments of cloth stuck to mummified remains, many of the adults missing feet, all missing bones that had been carried off by the scavenging dogs.”

The Enigma Affair (2022)

This is a terrific in media res (literally, “into the middle of things”) opening line, and the entire first paragraph goes from zero to sixty in a nanosecond. The dramatic nature of the line got my immediate attention, but its somewhat unusual phrasing also got me thinking, “I don’t know about anyone else, but if a bullet just whizzed past my left ear, it would be the only thing that concerned me!“ In the opening paragraph, the narrator continued:

“After all, she had sustained gunfire before, even been hit once—if you could call a graze on the forearm that barely left a scar a hit. No, what worried Patton was the sound this bullet made, or rather the sound this bullet didn’t make. Every bullet that had ever traveled near her had brought with it the distinctive crack of an object in supersonic motion. But this bullet merely hissed quietly as it crossed the kitchen before embedding itself in her refrigerator. This bullet was subsonic.”

At this point, we don’t understand why a subsonic bullet is more concerning than a supersonic one, but we’ve already been yanked into the story, and feel confident we’ll know the answer soon. In a blurb for the book, writer Rex Pickett (Sideways and The Archivist) hailed the novel for its “breathtaking, brisk prose that vaults you into the story at a torrid pace.”

The Bourne Identity [Book 1 of the Jason Bourne Series] (1980)

The novel opens with a dangerous storm at sea, threatening a trawler that is likened to an animal struggling for its very existence. The narrator continued: “The waves rose to Goliathan heights, crashing into the hull with the power of raw tonnage; the white spray caught in the night sky cascaded down over the deck under the force of the night wind. Everywhere there were the sounds of inanimate pain, wood straining against wood, ropes twisting, stretched to the breaking point. The animal was dying.”

All-Night Pharmacy (2023)

A sizzling simile is always a good way to begin a debut novel—and this is a particularly enticing one. The words come from an unnamed narrator, who goes on to explain:

“You never knew if it would end with you, euphoric, tanning topless on a fishing boat head for Ensenada, or coming to in a gas station bathroom, the insides of your eyes feeling as though they’d been scraped out with spoons. Often, it was both.“

All in all, this is one of the best things I’ve ever seen written about a problem sister. In a Publisher’s Weekly review, Louisa Ermelino wrote: “By the end of the first paragraph of Ruth Madievsky’s debut novel, All-Night Pharmacy…there’s no question you are in for a wild read.“

I was delighted to include Madievsky’s first sentence in my end-of-year Smerconish.com post of “23 of the Best Opening Lines of 2023” (see the full list here).

The Naked and the Dead (1948)

Tomás Nevinson (2021; first Eng. translation 2023)

A 2015 Scroll.in article hailed Marías as “The best literary start-up artist today.” It went on to say of him: “If there’s one thing that needs to be singled out from Marías’s work…it is his beginnings. No reader can stop at the first sentence.”

The celebrated Spanish author—who died of COVID complications at age 70 in 2022—continued his tradition of impressive openers in his final work, Tomás Nevinson, a 2021 novel that first became available in English in 2023.

The opening words come from the title character, a Spanish man who once worked for the British Secret Service. Now retired and living in his hometown of Madrid, he is approached by his former handler for one last assignment—to go undercover in search of a female terrorist. In his opening words, Nevinson added:

“You don’t touch women, you don’t beat them, you don’t do them any physical harm and you avoid all the violence, although in that regard they themselves don’t always hold back.”

The Bridges at Toko-Ri (1953)

This is a grisly, but captivating opening, and it grew out of Michener’s experience as a combat journalist. After serving as a U. S. Navy officer in WWII, in 1951 he was embedded with Task Force 77, an historic strike force of battleships and aircraft carriers brought back into action during the Korean War. Throughout the conflict, he wrote periodic dispatches for The Saturday Evening Post and other publications.

Michener’s Toko-Ri novella chronicled the experiences of U. S. Navy helicopter pilots who were tasked with destroying a series of heavily defended bridges in North Korea. An immediate bestseller, the book was quickly adapted into a highly regarded film by the same title, starring William Holden, Grace Kelly, Fredric March, Mickey Rooney, and others.

Legacy (1987)

In this fictional account of the Iran-Contra affair, the opening words come from U. S. Army Major Norman Starr. A member of the National Security Council, he has received a subpoena to appear before a congressional committee investigating illegal covert activities by U.S. military personnel.

In the novel’s second paragraph, Starr continued: “I had graduated from West Point just in time to join the final fighting in the rice paddies of Vietnam. Returning with a chest full of medals, a few earned, most routine, I married Nancy Makin, a girl from Maryland whom I’d been dating whenever I found myself with stateside duty. We had spent our first three years of married life in the Panama Canal Zone, where I had the shameful task of watching as Jimmy Carter gave away that marvel of engineering to the Panamanians.”

The Slowworm’s Coming (2022)

One sentence in, readers already know that the entire novel hinges on the contents of the letter in question. In the opening paragraph, the narrator and protagonist—a former British soldier and recovering alcoholic named Stephen Rose—continues: “Sometimes I look at it several times a day. I have shown it to no one. No one other than myself and the people who sent it know it exists.”

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 Sympathizer (2015)

The setting is the Vietnam War and the unnamed narrator is a captured North Vietnamese spy with one foot in each of two different worlds (his mother was Vietnamese and his father a French Catholic priest). As the novel opens, he is being forced to write a confession while confined to a 3-by-5-foot solitary cell. Nguyen’s debut novel went on to win the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and many other awards. 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.”

In 2017, Nguyen, a professor of English and American Studies at the University of Southern California, told the Atlantic’s Joe Fassler that he’d been struggling for months to write an opening sentence that would “grab the reader from the beginning” and “once it was written, would drive the rest of the novel completely.” One day, after many months poring over a new 2011 translation of António Lobo Antune’s 1979 novel Os Cus de Judas (published under the title Land at the End of the World), a line popped into his mind: “I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces.” Nguyen was elated. Finally, he had found his first sentence, saying to Fassler: “It just came to me. And I thought, that’s it. All I have to do is follow this voice for the rest of the novel, however long it takes.”

In the novel, the narrator continued: “Sometimes I flatter myself that this is a talent, and although it is admittedly one of a minor nature, it is perhaps also the sole talent I possess. At other times, when I reflect on how I cannot help but observe the world in such a fashion, I wonder if what I have should even be called talent. After all, a talent is something you use, not something that uses you. The talent you cannot not use, the talent that possesses you—that is a hazard, I must confess. But in the month when this confession begins, my way of seeing the world still seemed more of a virtue than a danger, which is how some dangers first appear.”

Going After Cacciato (1978)

This brilliantly understated opening line comes from Vietnam war soldier Paul Berlin, a frustrated and disenchanted soldier who ultimately chases a deserter named Cacciato, the only problem being that the deserter may exist only in his imagination. In the opening paragraph, he continued:

“Billy Boy Watkins was dead, and so was Frenchie Tucker. Billy Boy had died of fright, scared to death on the field of battle, and Frenchie Tucker had been shot through the nose. Bernie Lynn and Lieutenant Sidney Martin had died in tunnels. Pederson was dead and Rudy Chassler was dead. Buff was dead. Ready Mix was dead. They were all among the dead.”

In a 1978 New York Times article, Richard Freeman gave O’Brien’s novel a spectacular review, writing: “To call Going After Cacciato a novel about war is like calling Moby-Dick a novel about whales.” The book went on to win the 1979 National Book Award for Fiction.

“The Things They Carried,” the title story of The Things They Carried (1990)

In the first story in this collection of Vietnam-era short stories, the narrator continued: “They were not love letters, but Lieutenant Cross was hoping, so he kept them folded in plastic at the bottom of his rucksack. In the late afternoon, after a day’s March, he would dig his foxhole, wash his hands under a canteen, unwrap the letters, hold them with the tips of his fingers, and spend the last hour of light pretending.”

The book won 1990 Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. It is now regarded as a classic in war literature.

Defending Baltimore Against Enemy Attack: A Boyhood Year During World War II (2004)

My American Journey (2010; with Joseph E. Persico)

In stark contrast to the boring opening lines of so many autobiographies, Powell engages the reader from the very outset. He went on to describe how he and his wife almost died in a 1992 helicopter crash after accepting an invitation from Jamaican Prime Minister Michael Manley to visit his childhood home. At one point in their journey, Powell’s hosts suggested they use an aging UH-1 helicopter from the Jamaican government instead of his usual American Blackhawk. Powell wrote, “I could not easily reject their gesture of pride, though my antennae quivered.” Sadly, and as he feared, the helicopter crashed, but happily, the couple and the Jamaican pilots all survived.

“The Horrible Waste of War,” in New York World-Telegram (June 16, 1944)

These are the opening words of a D-Day dispatch filed by Pyle to his American readers. About them, writer and editor David A. Fryxell wrote in a 2008 Writer’s Digest article: “Understated? Certainly. Powerful? Even 50 years later.” Fryxell went on to add: “Pyle could have opened with a burst of exclamation-point prose; no question that his subject warranted it. He could have screamed about the casualties and the massive invasion fleet. He could have doled out comparisons to the Norman Conquest or piled adjective upon adverb. But instead he took his readers for a walk along the beach.”

In Fryxell’s article—titled “Tips for Powerful, Understated Writing”—he offered wise advice about the importance of understatement in nonfiction writing, especially when the topics being written about are large, powerful, or historic. He argued: “It’s precisely when writing about subjects that seem extreme that understatement can be most effective. If your subject is grand or overwrought or hyperbolic, if it comes already laden with innate drama (real or manufactured), you might find that speaking softly works better than a big stick.“

In the third paragraph of Pyle’s dispatch, he decided to add a dash of irony to his exceptional opening: “The water was full of squishy little jellyfish about the size of your hand. Millions of them. In the center each of them had a green design exactly like a four-leaf clover. The good-luck emblem. Sure. Hell, yes. Four-leaf clovers are supposed to be good-luck charms, but for the doughboys who perished on this blood-soaked beach of indescribable mayhem, D-Day was anything but lucky.”

Gravity’s Rainbow (1973)

In 2006, The American Book Review ranked this Number 3 on its classic list of “The 100 Best First Lines from Novels.” Younger readers may be forgiven for not recognizing this classic opening line as an unparalleled description of a WWII V-2 rocket propelling toward its target. Many modern readers also fail to appreciate how the book’s metaphorical title perfectly captures the parabolic trajectory of such a rocket from launch to final impact.

After the book was named co-winner (with Isaac Bashevis Singers’s A Crown of Feathers and Other Stories) of the 1974 National Book Award for Fiction, the notoriously reclusive Pynchon declined the award. Sensing a rare publicity opportunity, the president of Viking Press suggested that Professor Irwin Corey, an up-and-coming comedian, accept the award on Pynchon’s behalf. During Corey’s mock acceptance speech, a streaker famously ran across the stage and throughout the auditorium.

All Quiet on the Western Front (1928)

These are the first words one reads after opening the book—and they are among the most powerful I have ever seen at the beginning of a novel.

The opening paragraph is clearly an Author’s Note, a Prologue, or a Preface, but it has no formal heading. It simply appears as you see it above—naked, stark, and honest—and the impact is very real. For me, the opening words kept reverberating in my mind as I began to read Chapter I, which formally began: “We are at rest five miles behind the front. Yesterday we were relieved, and now our bellies are full of beef and haricot beans. We are satisfied and at peace.”

Remarque was a German veteran of WWI, and the original German title of his book was Im Westen nichts Neues, which translates to “Nothing New in the West,” with West referring to the Western Front of the war. When the book appeared in an English edition in 1929, it was given the now-classic title All Quiet on the Western Front. An international bestseller, it was quickly adapted into an Academy Award-winning 1930 film by the same title. In 2008, the American Film Institute ranked the film Number 7 in its list of “Top Ten Epic Films.”

I recently began to see Remarque’s opening paragraph in a new way when I learned that, fresh out of school, he was drafted at age eighteen and sent directly to the front lines of WWI. Wounded five separate times, he lost all of his friends in combat and was haunted by wartime memories for the rest of his life.

How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America (2020)

This is a terrific opening salvo for any book—but especially a history book—fitting into a category of openers that might be titled: “You think you know something, but you have it wrong.” As she continued, she proceeded to (for me, at least) a startling conclusion:

“Goldwater delivered the line that became a rally cry for a rising generation of conservatives in the Republican Party…But the moment did much more than galvanize activists. It marked the resurrection of an old political movement by a modern political party. In Goldwater’s time, people claiming to be embattled holdouts defending American liberty called themselves ‘Movement Conservatives.’ A century before, their predecessors had called themselves ‘Confederates.’”

Old Man’s War (2005)

This unusual statement comes from narrator and protagonist John Perry, a retired advertising writer who—at some unspecified time in the future—joins the Colonial Defense Forces, undergoes a process in which his mind is genetically reassigned to a new body, and ultimately engages in heroic exploits. This was Scalzi’s debut novel, and the first in a series of six “Old Man’s War” novels. It was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2006.

Sophie’s Choice (1979)

The protagonist, a WWII veteran and struggling young writer with the unusual name of Stingo, opens the novel nicely, but it’s about to get a whole lot better. As he continues, he advances the story with what I regard as literary history’s best-ever description of that dreaded condition known as Writer’s Block:

“At twenty-two, struggling to become some kind of writer, I found that the creative heat which at eighteen had nearly consumed me with its gorgeous, relentless flame had flickered out to a dim pilot light registering little more than a token glow in my breast, or wherever my hungriest aspirations once resided. It was not that I no longer wanted to write, I still yearned passionately to produce the novel which had been for so long captive in my brain. It was only that, having written down the first few fine paragraphs, I could not produce any others, or—to approximate Gertrude Stein’s remark about a lesser writer of the Lost Generation—I had the syrup but it wouldn’t pour.“

The novel went on to win the 1980 National Book Award for Fiction, but the story didn’t become a part of popular culture until the 1982 film adaptation, featuring an Oscar-winning performance by Meryl Streep.

The Last Days of Hitler (1947)

About this opening line, The Guardian’s Robert McCrum wrote in 2016: “From his commanding opening sentence, the author of this engrossing forensic masterpiece, a work of brilliant reportage, knows that the story he is about to unfold will be unputdownable, a scoop of historic proportions: history in the making.” McCrum ranked The Last Days of Hitler at No. 32 in The Guardian’s list of “The 100 Best Nonfiction Books” of all time. About the book, McCrum wrote:

“Some books simply exude excitement and self-confidence, as if the writer is on fire with ideas, or intoxicated with information. This is one of those titles.”

Writer John Banville was also a great Trevor-Roper fan, once describing him a “A Prince of the Essay” and offering this memorable assessment: “Few could compete with him for elegance, insight, and liveliness. A.J.P. Taylor, his friendly rival, once remarked that when he read one of Trevor-Roper’s essays, tears of envy stood in his eyes.“

The Guns of August (1962)

The book, an exhaustive examination of the first month of WWI, became an immediate hit and remained on The New York Times Best Seller list for 42 consecutive weeks. President Kennedy was so impressed with the work that he purchased copies for his entire cabinet and all of his principal military advisors, and ordered them to read it. The book went on to win the 1963 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction (it was ineligible for the history award because Pulitzer Prizes for History must be about American History).

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.”

Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)

This is one of literary history’s most admired opening lines, and I can understand why, for it might be considered an accurate description of every story ever told. The central message, expressed in other words, might go something like this: “I’m going to tell you a true story, but one that is not completely true.” As a reader, I’m thinking, “Okay, thanks for the heads-up.”

The narrator continued: “The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true. One guy I knew really was shot in Dresden for taking a teapot that wasn’t his. Another guy I knew really did threaten to have his personal enemies killed by hired gunmen after the war. And so on. I’ve changed all the names.”

The Caine Mutiny (1951)

The novel’s first paragraph beautifully sets the stage for the story that is about to unfold. The second makes the intriguing suggestion that seemingly innocuous characters can sometimes set off hugely significant events—and it does so in one of literary history’s best analogies.

The winner of the 1952 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the novel was adapted into a 1954 film, starring Humphrey Bogart as Captain Queeg and Robert Francis as Ensign Willie Keith. It was a magnificent film, and Bogart’s performance was legendary. At the Academy Award ceremonies later that year, though, the film lost out to On the Waterfront for Best Picture, and Bogart had to watch Marlon Brando walk off with the Oscar for Best Actor.

The Winds of War (1971)