What is it about a book that draws you in? The cover? The title? For the following books it's the first sentence that makes all the difference. It's nearly impossible to stop reading once the peculiarity of the first line grabs you.
"Captain Ahab was neither my first husband nor my last." - Ahab's Wife by Sena Jeter Naslund
"I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974." - Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenedies
"It was bitter cold, the air electric with all that had not happened yet." - A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick
"The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there." - The Go-Between by L.P. Hartley
"In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly-fishing." A River Runs Through It by Norman Maclean
"If I could tell you one thing about my life it would be this: when I was seven years old the mailman ran over my head." - The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint by Brady Udall
"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen." - 1984 by George Orwell
"Mum starved herself for suffrage, Grandmother claiming it was just like Mum to take a cause too far." - A Short History of Women by Kate Walbert
"I remember with utter clarity the first great shock of my life." - Trinity by Leon Uris
"It was a pleasure to burn." - Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
"It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love." - Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
"The last camel collapsed at noon." - The Key to Rebecca by Ken Follett
For more info read or listen to NPR's "Famous First Words," check out The Guardian's Books Blog post "What's Your Favourite First Line?" and peruse American Book Review's list of the "100 Best First Lines from Novels."
What is your favorite first line from a book?
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