Famous First Words

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I I love good first lines. In some ways, a book’s first line is probably the most important sentence in the book for me. The best first lines beckon and lure us into the author’s imagination. They challenge us, implicitly saying, “I bet you can’t stop here,” and they usually win the bet. What avid reader doesn’t remember Charles Dickens’s first line in A Tale of Two Cities (even if they never read the novel itself all the way through): “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. . . .”

Of course, it’s always terrifically disappointing when these great first lines promise much and deliver little, but I promise you that these eight books not only have enticing first lines, but are perfectly wonderful all the way to the last line.

Pete Dexter’s The Paperboy begins with a line that captures you with its world of possibilities: “My brother Ward was once a famous man.”

Rhian Ellis opens After Life, her first novel, with a definite hint of mystery, not to say menace: “First I had to get his body into the boat.”




It’s hard to read the beginning of Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle without a smile: “I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.”

A Primate’s Memoir: A Neuroscientist’s Unconventional Life Among the Baboons, by Robert Sapolsky, starts this way: “I joined the baboon troop during my twenty-first year. I had never planned to become a savanna baboon when I grew up; instead, I had always assumed I would become a mountain gorilla.”

The long first line of Scott Spencer’s Endless Love effectively sets the stage for this amazing novel of adolescent passion: “When I was seventeen and in full obedience to my heart’s most urgent commands, I stepped far from the pathway of normal life and in a moment’s time ruined everything I loved—I loved so deeply, and when the love was interrupted, when the incorporeal body of love shrank back in terror and my own body was locked away, it was hard for others to believe that a life so new could suffer so irrevocably.”

Jon Cohen’s The Man in the Window begins thus: “Atlas Malone saw the angel again, this time down by the horse chestnut tree.”

‘“You’ll want to scratch,’ said the nurse. ‘Don’t,’ said the orderly,” is how No One Thinks of Greenland begins, by John Griesemer.

The almost forgotten but delightful The Towers of Trebizond by Rose Macaulay begins, “‘Take my camel, dear,’ said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass.”