On January 1, 2020, I launched www.GreatOpeningLines.com, history’s first website devoted exclusively to the celebration of great opening lines in world literature. After a modest beginning, it is now the world’s largest online database of literary openers, with more than 2,000 entries. If you’re a writer or aspiring writer, an avid reader, or simply a First Words junkie, consider it your “Go-To” site on the subject.
When the site was launched, I commemorated the event by doing a Smerconish.com post on “Twenty of the Best Opening Lines of 2020”. Since then, I’ve followed up with similar end-of-year lists for 2021, 2022, and 2023. This marks my fifth annual compilation.
It is a truism in the literary world that the purpose of a book’s opening words is to keep the reader reading. In a 2015 blog post, the crime-fiction writer P. J. Parrish nicely expanded on the idea:
“The importance of a great opening goes beyond
its ability to keep the reader just turning the pages.
A great opening is a book’s soul in miniature.
Within those first few paragraphs—sometimes buried,
sometimes artfully disguised, sometimes signposted—
are all the seeds of theme, style and most powerfully,
the very voice of the writer….”
An exceptional opener has other purposes as well, as writer Chuck Wendig suggested in a 2012 article in The Ramble:
“A great first line is the collateral that grants the
author a line of intellectual credit from the reader.
The reader unconsciously commits:
‘That line was so damn good, I’m in for the next 50 pages.’”
And in a 2013 interview with Joe Fassler of The Atlantic magazine, Stephen King offered perhaps the best thing ever said on the subject:
“An opening line should invite
the reader to begin the story.
It should say: Listen. Come in here.
You want to know more about this.
How can a writer extend an appealing invitation—
one that’s difficult, even, to refuse?”
Appealing openings can take many different forms, as you will shortly see. I found all of this year’s selections—twelve from the world of fiction and an equal number from non-fiction—not merely difficult to refuse, but almost impossible. Perhaps they’ll have that same effect on you.
(1) KAT AILES
For my boyfriend’s thirtieth birthday I thought I’d go all out and surprise him with a pregnancy.
The Expectant Detectives (2024)
Great opening lines often have a surprise ending, and this one from a witty young Londoner who we know only by the name of Alice begins conventionally before taking a delightfully unexpected turn.
(2) CAMILLE BORDAS
On Wednesdays, three of them had to perform, in turn, a four-to-six-minute routine that the whole class then proceeded to rip apart, joke by joke, beat by beat, until there wasn’t anything left and the budding comedians went home to consider other possible career paths.
It’s hard to imagine a better first sentence for a novel about a school for aspiring stand-up comics. Writer Percival Everett (James and other works) wrote about the entire novel, “Brilliance is on display here.” And something similar might also be said about this opener—which perfectly captures the potential for catastrophic thinking that exists among almost all comedians.
(3) AMY JO BURNS
Waylon Joseph crouched behind Mercury’s ballfields bleachers on the south end of town, smoking a cigarette and hiding from his wife.
I don’t know about you, but if any novel began by including the phrase “hiding from his wife,” I’d be sure to read on. With this first sentence, it also helps if you envision it as the opening scene of a movie. Imagine a longshot of a high school athletic complex, with the camera zooming in over an athletic field, slowly approaching a set of bleachers, and, finally, closing in on the face of a man with a cigarette clasped between his lips and his eyes furtively peering out.
(4) CLARE CHAMBERS
In all failed relationships there is a point that passes unnoticed at the time, which can later be identified as the beginning of the decline.
I love an opening line that speaks with great authority about human affairs, and after reading this one, I paused for a moment to identify any critical tipping points in my own history of failed relationships. When my eyes returned to the first paragraph, the second sentence shut down my moment of reverie and immediately pulled me back into the book:
“For Helen it was the weekend that the Hidden Man came to Westbury Park.”
(5) CONNIE CHUNG
I didn’t start out wanting to be a guy.
My initial reaction to this first sentence was to think I’d accidentally stumbled upon a gender transition memoir. Was Chung aware of the opening line’s creative ambiguity? I’ve got to believe she was. It also worked remarkably well in her case, though, as she went on to describe “the overwhelmingly male-dominated television news business” of the late 1960s.
Reading on, I was surprised—and even a little shocked—to see the lengths Chung went to in order to blend in with her male colleagues: “I became aggressive, tough, bawdy, and extremely competitive. Yes, I looked like a lotus blossom, but I talked like a sailor with a raw sense of humor.”
(6) PERCIVAL EVERETT
Those little bastards were hiding out there in the tall grass.
These intriguing opening words come from a runaway slave the literary world has long known as Jim, but who, in Everett’s acclaimed reimagining of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, prefers to be called James.
In Everett’s version, James is a highly intelligent self-educated man who only pretends to be semi-literate as a survival strategy. And the little bastards in the tall grass, we soon learn, are Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer. James continued with a description of the two boys that actually revealed more about him:
“Those white boys, Huck and Tom, watched me. They were always playing some kind of pretending game where I was either a villain or prey, but certainly their toy. They hopped about out there with the chiggers, mosquitoes, and other biting bugs, but never made any progress toward me. It always pays to give white folks what they want, so I stepped into the yard and called out into the night, ‘Who dat dere in da dark lak dat?’”
(7) PATRIC GAGNE
Whenever I ask my mother if she remembers the time in second grade when I stabbed a kid in the head with a pencil, her answer is the same:
“Vaguely.”
I knew within a nano-second of first reading this opener that I would be including it in my “Best of 2024” list. In the remainder of the first chapter, Gagne—a lifelong sociopath who ultimately earned a Ph.D. in psychology—revealed the many ways she was different from other children, including stealing things before she could talk.
(8) ANASTASIA HASTINGS
London
November 4, 1885
It is a sad day, indeed, when even an orgy does not interest me.
Of all this year’s selections, this was my personal favorite—a sensational opener that perfectly captured what it’s like to be having a truly sad day.
In the novel’s second paragraph, we learn that the orgy in question is not one the proper Sephora Manville has been participating in, but only reading about in a penny dreadful, the Victorian Era term for inexpensive (a penny a copy) serial magazines with sensational, and often lurid content (and commonly viewed as “dreadful” by high-brow critics).
(9) EMILY HEIL
Have you ever paused, halfway through destroying a sleeve of Girl Scout Cookies, and thought to yourself, “Ya know, I wish my armpits could smell just like this?”
In the world of journalism, a first sentence is called a lede, and this bizarre-but-brilliant specimen was one of the year’s best. Heil continued in her opening paragraph:
“Me neither. Nevertheless, the chance to slather yourself with the scent of Thin Mints and their sister confections has arrived: The Girl Scouts of the USA is partnering with the personal-care brand Native for a newly launched line of shampoos, conditioners, body washes and—yep—deodorants inspired by some of the Scouts’ most famous cookies.”
(10) GEORGE M. JOHNSON
My heroes were hidden from me.
Flamboyants: The Queer Harlem Renaissance I Wish I’d Known (2024)
These haunting opening words capture the existential predicament of a young black boy who, while trying to make sense of his own developing homosexuality, has absolutely no knowledge of the countless gay black people who existed before him—and especially those who came to prominence during the Harlem Renaissance. Johnson eloquently summed up the situation a bit later in the first chapter:
“I often say that it is hard for someone to look in the mirror and see a reflection when they can’t see any reflections of themselves out in the world.”
(11) RACHEL KUSHNER
Neanderthals were prone to depression, he said. He said they were prone to addiction, too, and especially smoking.
The juxtaposition of opposing ideas is a staple in the world of great opening lines, and this one is a provocative blending of ancient history with modern human frailty. In a New York Times book review, Dwight Garner wrote:
“You know from this book’s opening paragraphs that you are in the hands of a major writer, one who processes experience on a deep level. Kushner has a gift for almost effortless intellectual penetration.”
(12) KATIA LIEF
The first time the thought came to her, with clarity instead of anger, it was a warm evening in June not long before the party that was supposed to launch a new phase of her husband’s brilliant career. She was standing at the kitchen sink sponging tomato sauce off a white plate. She rinsed it and set it dripping in the dish drainer, then picked up a wineglass and scrubbed at a haze of lip gloss biting the rim. She put the glass down but left the water running, as if the sound could blot out her thoughts, as if he could hear them through the linkage of empty rooms.
What if I killed him?
The novel’s opening words are a masterclass in a microcosm. Beginning with the first time the thought came to her, the narrator—who we will shortly learn is a former pioneering filmmaker who has morphed into a middle-aged wife and mother—immediately arouses the reader’s curiosity and plants an important seed. Then, after a brief, but quite lovely, description of mundane dishwashing details, she drops the hammer.
(13) RICHARD LUSCOMBE
Cops in New Orleans are on the tail of a brazen gang of narcotics traffickers who broke into the evidence room at police headquarters and pilfered all the pot: a swarm of rodents with a hankering for the high life.
This opening sentence has it all: rats…getting high from weed…stolen from an evidence room…at police headquarters…and, of course, in New Orleans. You can’t make this stuff up, but you can write an unforgettable first sentence about it—as Luscombe does so brilliantly here.
And yes, in case you were wondering, he did – quite appropriately – write on the tail and not on the trail.
(14) FRIEDA McFADDEN
There’s blood everywhere.
The Housemaid is Watching (2024)
We’re only three words into the novel and readers have already been grabbed by their collars and yanked into the middle of a grisly crime scene. McFadden—who I have come to regard as a modern master of the Great Opening Line—has the narrator continue in the second paragraph:
“I’ve never seen so much blood. It’s soaking the cream-colored rug, seeping into the nearby floorboards, speckling the legs of the oak coffee table. Perfect oval droplets have made it all the way to the seat of the pale leather sofa, and large rivulets drip down the alabaster wall.”
The prolific Ms. McFadden actually published two novels in 2024, and her second one—titled The Teacher—also had an engaging opening line:
“Digging a grave is hard work.”
(15) AMMI MIDSTOKKE
Recently, while criticizing my husband for something flawed in his person, like how he laces his boots or something, I was struck by a realization. Either I am perfect or my husband enjoys the relative peace that reigns when we both pretend I am.
“How to Build a Pedestal,” in The Spokesman-Review [Spokane, Washington] (Feb. 22, 2024)
When writers ask me, “What’s the best way to begin my book (or article, or essay), I have a stock answer: “Write something brilliant, if you can. That’s the only sure-fire way to ensure that readers will continue reading.” Happily, I did not have to give that advice to Midstokke, for she already knew the answer.
(16) SHARON McMAHON
New York
1804
Alexander Hamilton was going to die. And he knew it.
The Small and the Mighty (2024)
When historians view themselves as storytellers rather than writers of fact and chroniclers of events, the quality of their efforts improve markedly—as McMahon demonstrates in this superb first sentence about Alexander Hamilton’s dire medical condition after his famous 1804 duel with Aaron Burr. The stellar quality of the opening words continued in the first paragraph:
“He was stoic, though his pain was great. His brow was feverish, his body now partially paralyzed from the bullet lodged in his spine. Dose after dose of wine and laudanum were poured down his throat to take the edge off. The tang of coagulating blood hung so heavy in the July air that the people tending to his injuries could nearly taste it on their tongues.”
(17) CHANDLER MORRISON
Only lies are sexy.
People have been talking about the alluring nature of lies for centuries, but nobody has expressed it more starkly or provocatively than Morrison does in his opening words. The narrator continued in the second paragraph:
“Guys like Ryland Richter knew this. When the girl asked him what he did for a living, lying was the only option.”
About Morrison’s darkly satirical novel, the Midwest Book Review wrote: “American Narcissus showcases…the kind of narrative storytelling style that keeps and holds the reader’s rapt attention from start to finish.”
(18) ALEXEI NAVALNY
Dying really didn’t hurt.
This is—if you will pardon the expression—a killer of an opening line, but to fully appreciate it, it helps to be familiar with the backstory.
In 2020, flying back to Moscow from a political trip to Siberia, Navalny, the charismatic leader of the Russian opposition to Vladimir Putin’s dictatorial rule, became ill just after boarding the plane. An hour later, after the plane made an emergency landing, he was attached to a ventilator in a hospital intensive care unit—and fighting for his life. A few days later, a team of German doctors determined that he’d been poisoned with the deadly nerve agent Novichok.
After the opening sentence, the memoir’s entire first chapter described that brief but terrifying flight experience. Once Navalny realized he’d been poisoned, he alerted the flight attendant to his grave condition. Within minutes, he was lying on his back and, as his eyes were fixated on the wall of the plane’s galley, he felt his life slipping away. The chapter ended as superbly as it began:
“I have just enough time to think, It’s all lies, what they say about death. My whole life is not flashing before my eyes. The faces of those dearest to me do not appear. Neither do angels or a dazzling light. I am dying looking at a wall. The voices behind become indistinct, and the last words I hear are the woman shouting, ‘No, stay awake, stay awake.’ Then I died.
“Spoiler alert: actually, I didn’t.”
(19) TRACY O’NEILL
A few years back, despite a lifelong renunciation of the urge, I surrendered to obsession with a woman. So I was beside myself.
Woman of Interest: A Memoir (2024)
Yes, I know what you’re thinking, and I’m pretty sure it’s exactly what O’Neill wanted readers to think. But she’s engaging in a classic bit of misdirection here, and the woman in question is not some captivating female lover, but her birth mother—a Korean woman who gave her up for adoption to an American couple three decades earlier. O’Neill concluded her opening paragraph by plaintively writing:
“I wanted her, wanted everything, and all of her was missing.”
(20) TIMOTHY SCHAFFERT
I spotted my name, again and again, on the lists of the dead. Even as the weeks went by and the reports got fixed, my name didn’t budge.
The Titanic Survivors Book Club (2024)
These are the arresting opening words of a White Star Line employee—a young English apprentice librarian named Yorick—who was left stranded on the dock when the RMS Titanic began its maiden voyage out of Southhampton, England on April 10, 1912. Yorick pulled readers deeper into the story when he continued in the second paragraph:
“Lists of those who perished, and of those who didn’t, began to be published only days after the wreck. And for days after that, as facts shifted, a name might slip from one list to the other. People who lived died, people who died lived.”
Over a year after the ship’s sinking, Yorick—now the proprietor of a small Paris bookshop—received a mysterious invitation from a secret society of people who were booked for passage on the Titanic, but who, for one reason or another, also didn’t board the ship. It’s a perfectly delightful set-up for a perfectly delightful tale.
(21) TOM SELLECK
On a sweeping turn, one of the wheels slipped off the pavement onto the soft dirt shoulder. The rear-engine car immediately lost traction, went into an uncontrolled skid and over the edge.
You Never Know: A Memoir (2024)
Most celebrity memoirs don’t begin with a literary flourish, but Selleck’s in media res (“In the middle of things”) opening describes the first moments of a catastrophic car accident. In the opening paragraph, he continued:
“Everything after that seemed to slow down. I was in the passenger seat as the car floated in the air, turning over on its axis. We had been bowling, and the two bowling balls flew around the cabin, seeking and all too often finding their target. It was a dark night, and I couldn’t see where the descent was taking us. Then I felt a painful, overwhelming crunch as the car hit the ground upside down.”
Selleck’s exceptionally well-written description puts us directly inside the middle of a car that is turning over in mid-air before crash landing on its roof. The tantalizing detail about two bowling balls dangerously thrashing around in the overturned vehicle gives the scene a quality of verisimilitude it might have lacked had they not been mentioned.
(22) GARY SHTEYNGART
My first glimpse of Royal Caribbean’s Icon of the Seas, from the window of an approaching Miami cab, brings on a feeling of vertigo, nausea, amazement, and distress. I shut my eyes in defense, as my brain tells my optic nerves to try again.
“Crying Myself to Sleep on the Biggest Cruise Ship Ever,” in The Atlantic (April 4, 2024)
This is the priceless opening paragraph of what will almost certainly become one of the best “travel” pieces of 2024, subtitled: “Seven Agonizing Nights Aboard the Icon of the Seas.”
The largest ship—by far—in the history of cruise ships, the boat was announced to great fanfare in 2023, and Shteyngart was one of the many journalists who were invited on its maiden seven-day voyage in January 2024. After the article appeared, I’m sure at least one Royal Caribbean executive said, “Who the hell invited that guy on board?”
(23) RUFI THORPE
You are about to begin reading a new book, and to be honest, you are a little tense. The beginning of a novel is like a first date. You hope that from the first lines an urgent magic will take hold, and you will sink into the story like a hot bath, giving yourself over entirely.
Margo’s Got Money Troubles (2024)
It’s rare to see the topic of Great Opening Lines explored in a novel’s actual opening lines, but it does occasionally happen, as we see Rufi Thorpe do so masterfully here. In the opening paragraph, narrator and protagonist Margo Millet—a community college student who was born eighteen years earlier to a Hooters waitress mother and ex-pro wrestler father—continued:
“But this hope is tempered by the expectation that, in reality, you are about to have to learn a bunch of people’s names and follow along politely like you are attending the baby shower of a woman you hardly know. And that’s fine, goodness knows you’ve fallen in love with books that didn’t grab you in the first paragraph. But that doesn’t stop you from wishing they would, from wishing they would come right up to you in the dark of your mind and kiss you on the throat.”
(24) BOB WOODWARD
As rioters stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, President Donald Trump watched on television from his private dining room next to the Oval Office.
A common feature of great opening lines is to juxtapose the monumental with the mundane—and this one deftly contrasts the chaos and violence of an unprecedented historical event with the banality of an American President passively watching it unfold on television in his private dining room. Woodward’s remarkable first sentence comes from a work of non-fiction, but it is so compelling it would’ve also made my “Best of 2024” list if it had appeared in a novel.
As I pointed out in my previous end-of-year posts, I don’t regard the selections above as the best opening lines of 2024, but rather as twenty-four of the very best. My selections reflect my tastes and preferences, and a similar list created by you would almost certainly be considerably different. In making my selections, I’ve sampled somewhere between four and five thousand books, which means I’ve only dipped my toes into the massive ocean of books published this past year. If I’d been able to examine more, some of the this year’s selections would’ve likely been replaced by even better ones.
If you failed to find your favorite opening lines from 2024 in this post, there’s a good chance you might find them at www.GreatOpeningLines.com. And if you cannot find them there, please e-mail them to me at [email protected]. If I concur with your assessment, I’ll make sure they get posted on the site.
See you next year.
Mardy
Dr. Mardy Grothe is a retired psychologist and author of eight quotation anthologies, including Oxymoronica and I Never Metaphor I Didn’t Like (for more, go to: www.drmardy.com). The compiler of “Dr. Mardy’s Dictionary of Metaphorical Quotations” (DMDMQ), he also publishes a weekly newsletter on Substack (drmardygrothe.substack.com).
