Some Top Opening Lines

With many wonderful books out there, there are some that stand on the power of their first lines alone. The power of an opening lines can hold up an novel, either to keep your interest for the early chapters, or just out of sheer curiosity as to what they could possibly be leading to. So here are some great opening lines, some that have stuck with me over the years, and some that I’ve only encountered recently. I hope this makes for interesting reading, or maybe even some suggested reading!

Remembered – Yvonne Battle-Felton
“4.30 am
She’s sitting there on top of the chifforobe rocking back and forth, swinging her legs in time to some music she heard ten, twenty years ago.”

The Heart’s Invisible Furies – John Boyne
“Long before we discovered that he had fathered two children by two different women, one in Drimoleague and one in Clonakilty, Father James Monroe stood on the alter of the Church of Our Lady, Star of the Sea, in the parish of Goleen, West Cork, and denounced my mother as a whore.”

Djinn Patrol On The Purple Line – Deepa Anappara
“When Mental was alive, he was a boss-man with eighteen or twenty children working for him, and he almost never raised his hand against any of them.”

The War of the Worlds – H. G. Wells
“No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men buised themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.”

Crescent City: House of Earth and Blood – Sarah J. Maas
“There was a wolf at the gallery door.”

A Room Of One’s Own – Virginia Woolf
“But, you may say, we asked you to speak about women and fiction – what has that got to do with a room of one’s own?”

The Song Of Achilles – Madeline Miller
“My father was a king and the song of kings.”

11.22.63 – Stephen King
“I have never been what you’d call a crying man.”

Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone – J. K. Rowling
“Mr and Mrs Dursley, of number four, Pirvet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.”

The Other Half Of Augusta Hope – Joanna Glen
“My parents didn’t seem the sort of people who would end up killing someone.”