Great books begin with great sentences - here are our favourites
A perfect opening line can feel like the turning of a key: suddenly, a world opens. From classics to slightly more contemporary gems, these iconic first sentences have captured imaginations for decades.
As we launch into a new year of reading, here are ten of the greatest literary beginnings.
‘The circus arrives without warning.’
The first line of this novel immediately drops you into the magical world of Le Cirque des Rêves, which seems to cast a spell over all who wander its circular paths. But behind the glittering acrobats, fortune-tellers and contortionists a fierce competition is underway.
Celia and Marco are two young magicians in the Circus, who have been trained since childhood for a deadly duel. With the lives of everyone at the Circus of Dreams at stake, they must test the very limits of the imagination, and of their love.
‘It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.’
Instantly recognisable and endlessly riffed from, Pride and Prejudice has been a staple for romance readers around the world and across centuries.
When Elizabeth Bennet meets Mr Darcy, she is repelled by his overbearing pride and prejudice towards her family. But the Bennet girls are in need of financial security in the shape of husbands, so when Darcy’s friend, the affable Mr Bingley, forms an attachment to Jane, Darcy becomes increasingly hard to avoid. Polite society will be turned upside down in this witty drama of friendship, rivalry and love.
‘You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler .’
Directly addressing the reader from the first line, this is an opening that hooks you immediately into the unique story Italo is about to tell.
This remarkable novel leads you through many different books including a detective adventure, a romance, a satire, an erotic story, a diary and a quest. But the real hero is you, the reader.
‘In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.’
This opening line immediately frames the narrator Nick Carraway as both observer and moral compass, inviting readers into a world where appearances glitter and truths lurk just beneath the surface.
The world and his mistress are at Jay Gatsby’s party. But Gatsby stands apart from the crowd, isolated by a secret longing. In between sips of champagne his guests speculate about their mysterious host. Some say he’s a bootlegger. Others swear he was a German spy during the war. They lean in and whisper ‘he killed a man once’. Just where is Gatsby from and what is the obsession that drives him?
‘It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.’
Orwell sets the reader up to understand immediately that things won't quite be what you'd expect in this must-read dystopian classic.
The year is 1984. War and revolution have created an unrecognisable world. Great Britain, now known as Airstrip One, is ruled by the Party, led by Big Brother. Mass surveillance is total and The Thought Police ensure no individual thinking is allowed.
‘Since I barely venture outside these days, I spend a lot of time in one of the armchairs, rereading the books.’
Jacqueline Harpman sets the the reader up with the first question of many they will have throughout the short novel.
Deep underground, thirty-nine women are kept in isolation in a cage. Above ground, a world awaits. Has it been abandoned? Devastated by a virus? Watched over by guards, the women have no memory of how they got there, no notion of time, and only vague recollection of their lives before.
A young girl - the fortieth prisoner - sits alone an outcast in the corner. Soon she will show herself to be the key to the others' escape and survival in the strange world that awaits them above ground.
‘Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.’
Introducing us immediately to the titular (and iconic) character, in this vivid portrait of one day in a woman's life, Clarissa Dalloway is preoccupied with the last-minute details of a party she is to give that evening. As she readies her house she is flooded with memories and re-examines the choices she has made over the course of her life.
‘All this happened, more or less.’
With a disarming honesty and dark sense of humour, Vonnegut breaks the illusion of traditional war stories and prepares the reader for a novel that confronts trauma, time and absurdity with radical frankness.
Billy Pilgrim – hapless barber's assistant, successful optometrist, alien abductee, senile widower and soldier – has become unstuck in time. Hiding in the basement of a slaughterhouse in Dresden, with the city and its inhabitants burning above him, he finds himself a survivor of one of the most deadly and destructive battles of the Second World War. But when, exactly? How did he get here? And how does he get out?
‘I sometimes wonder what was disappeared first - among all the things that have vanished from the island.’
First published in 1994 and then translated to English in 2019 by Stephen Snyder, The Memory Police immerses the reader in their new world where there is enforced forgetting and the erasure of everyday objects reveals the fragile, haunting link between memory, identity and power.
When a young novelist discovers that her editor is in danger of being taken away by the Memory Police, she desperately wants to save him. For some reason, he doesn't forget, and it's becoming increasingly difficult for him to hide his memories. Who knows what will vanish next?
