books with great opening lines

One of the best feelings as a reader is knowing you’re going to love a book from the very first page, even better when it’s the first line.

Not every great book begins with a great opening line, and not every great opening line leads to a great book. But when both coincide, it’s pretty special.

This isn’t a list of the greatest opening lines in literature—there are already plenty of those online, usually featuring all the classics. Instead, it’s a recommendation list based on opening lines: books that hooked me from the very start.

"The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation."

“In the next town over, a man had killed his family.”

“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderely again.”

“It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York."

“What makes Iago evil? some people ask. I never ask.”

"In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.”

“When I was a child, I loved old men, and I could tell that they also loved me."

“Everyone in Shaker Heights was talking about it that summer: how Isabelle, the last of the Richardson children, had finally gone around the bend and burned the house down.”

“I drove myself out of New York City where a man shot himself in front of me.”

"A girl comes of age against the knife."

“Many years ago I realized that a book, a novel, is a dream that asks itself to be written in the same way we fall in love with someone: the dream becomes impossible to resist, there’s nothing you can do about it, you finally give in and succumb even if your instincts tell you to run the other way because this could be, in the end, a dangerous game—someone will get hurt.”

“I arrived in Berlin at the beginning of February, before the shame and guilt brewing somewhere low in my stomach turned symptomatic.”

“Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.”

Do you have any favourite opening line/s? I’d love to hear some of them in the comments! Also, let me know if any of these first lines have piqued your interest and you’re planning to read the book now 💌

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