Novels with Terrific Opening Lines
The opening lines of a novel are important to me. As a reader, I want the beginning of a novel to give me a reason to snuggle into my chair.
Great opening lines give me a sense of the narrator’s voice, the tone of the tale, and a hook that captures my imagination.
Here are some of my favorite opening lines with affiliate links to the corresponding novels. How many can you identify?
5 Novels with Terrific Opening Lines
“Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.”
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“On the night that I was born, my paternal grandfather, Josef Tock, made ten predictions that shaped my life. Then he died in the very minute that my mother gave birth to me.”
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“As she woke up in the pod, she remembered three things. First, she was traveling through open space. Second, she was about to start a new job, one she could not screw up. Third, she had bribed a government official into giving her a new identity file. None of this information was new, but it wasn’t pleasant to wake up to.”
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“It began with my father not wanting to see the Last Rabbit and ended up with my being eaten alive by a carnivorous plant.”
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“The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.”
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Oil and Dust
While writing (and rewriting and rewriting and rewriting…) the opening of Oil and Dust, I went back repeatedly to the opening lines of my favorite books for inspiration. Here’s the final result!
What are your favorite opening lines from novels?
Header Photo by Lenin Estrada on Unsplash
On the morning of her 9th birthday, the day after Madame Francoise Derbanne slapped her, Suzanne peed on the rose bushes (“Cane River” – Lalita Tademy
I was sitting in a taxi, wondering if I had overdressed for the evening, when I looked out the window and saw Mom rooting through a dumpster. “The Glass Castle – Jeannette Walls
Oh, these are both great! I haven’t read either, but now I’m looking them up.
The most memorable of opening lines that occurred to me was by Charles Dickens in “A Tale of Two Cities”:
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”
Great one! I’ve always enjoyed the rhythm and paradox of it, but by today’s standards, at 119 words, it’s probably on the long side for a single sentence.