Favourite First Lines in Fiction

Have you ever been wooed by the first line of a book? Have you ever settled in to read, got as far as the first sentence, and immediately gone ‘Oh, I’m going to love this book’? We definitely have!

Inspired by The Bookshop Band’s amazing song ‘Once Upon a Time’ which is made up almost completely from the first lines of famous books, we shared some of the first lines of our favourite books on Twitter and Instagram, and seeing if our followers could guess which books they were from!

Check it out here.

The answers are below, so if you haven’t already had a guess, don’t scroll down!

If you have, these are the first lines of these books:

Circe – “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.”

High-Rise Mystery – “If you think finding a body is a fun adventure, you’re 33% right.”

Early Riser – “Mrs Tiffen could play the bazouki.”

Leonard and Hungry Paul – “Leonard was raised by his mother with cheerfully concealed difficulty, his father having died tragically during childbirth.”

Heap House – “It all really began, all the terrible business that followed, on the day my Aunt Rosamud’s door handle went missing.”

The Starless Sea – “There is a pirate in the dungeon.”

Middlesex – “I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detriot day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.”