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"Hooked from the First Lines – Let’s Catch Our Readers!"

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"Hooked from the First Lines – Let’s Catch Our Readers!"

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First lines matter. They set the tone, spark curiosity, and pull the reader in. In this activity, you'll explore famous first lines. Try writing your own gripping openers. Let’s get creative and inspire each other!

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"My name is Victor Frankenstein. My father, Alphonse, came from Geneva. He met my mother when his best friend, Beaufort, died. Beaufort left his daughter, Caroline, with no money. Where could she live? My father found her a room in his cousin Louisa's house. Two years later, he married her".

Mary Shelley, Oxford Dominoes One

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"Nell came home one day just before dinnertime and found the front door open. The car was gone. There was a trail of blood splotches on the steps, and once she was inside the house, she followed it along the hall carpet and into the kitchen. There was a knife on the cutting board, one of tig's favourites, Japanese steel, very sharp - and beside it, a blood-stained carrot, one end severed. Their daughter, nine at the time, was nowhere to be found".

Margaret Atwood, DoubleDay, New York

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"Shhh! Violet Speedwell frowned. She did not need shushing, she had not said anything".

Tracy Chevalier, The Borough Press

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"There used to be an empty chair at the back of my classroom. It wasn't a special chair. It was just empty because there was no one sitting in it. But then, one day just three weeks after school started, the most exciting thing that could ever happen to anyone, happened to me and my three best friends. And it all began with that chair".

Ontali Q. Raúf, Hachette, UK

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"JOAN GOODWIN GETS TO THE JOHNSON SPACE CENTER WELL BEFORE nine, and Houston is already airless and muggy. Joan can feel the sweat collecting along her hairline as she walks across the campus to the Mission Control building. She knows it's the heat. But she also knows that's not all it is".

Taylor Jenkins Reid, A Ballantine Books International Edition. Random House Books.

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"Amma

is walking along the promenade of the waterway that bisects her city, a few early morning barges cruise slowly by

to her left is the nautical-themed footbridge with its deck-like walkway and sailing mast pylons

to her right is the bend in the river as it heads east past Waterloo Bridge towards the dome of St Paul's

she feels the sun begin to rise, the air still breezy before the city clogs up with heat and fumes

a violinist plays something suitably uplifting further along the promenade

Amma's play, The Last Amazon of Dahomey, opens at the national tonight"

Bernardine Evaristo, Penguin Fiction

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"There's a story I've heard many times about how my brother Jason got the scar that runs above his left eye, almost parallel with his eyebrow. He was four years old when I was born, and he'd wanted a brother, a sister or a dog for as long as he could remember, but Mum and Dad had always said no".

John Boyne, Penguin Fiction

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"Al Brown is thirteen. He lives with his parents in a little house. It's in Nottingham in England. The family are happy, but they have not got much money. So life is not easy".

Lesley Thompson, Oxford, Quick Starter Dominoes

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"My brother Tony is stupid, but he likes good music. I listen to his records before school when he and my dad are out on the picket line. My grandmother - we call her Nan - likes the music too. I play the music and she sits in bed and sings. Sometimes we dance around the room. She's nearly eighty and she can't walk far. But she lifts her arms up in the air and tries to stand on one leg like a ballet dancer".

Melvin Burgess, Penguin Readers

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"When our story begins, King Anguish is the King of Ireland and King Mark is the King of Cornwall. Ireland is a bigger country than Cornwall and so every year King Mark must give money to King Anguish's brother, Morold, and his men".

Retold by Bill Bowler, Oxford, Starter Dominoes

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"Florence Green has a huge personal challenge. She wishes to set up a bookshop in a small town called Hardborough. She seems to be quite worried as this is something won't be easy".

Penelope Fitzgerald.

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"I was looking for a quiet place to die. Someone recommended Brooklyn, and so the next morning I travelled down there from Westchester to scape out the train. I hadn't been back in fifty-six years, and I remembered nothing".

Paul Auster, Faber And Faber Ltd.

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" My father and mother should have stayed in New York where they met and married and where I was born. Instead, they returned to Ireland when I was four, my brother Malachy, three, the twins, Oliver and Eugene, barely one, and my sister, Margaret, dead and gone".

Frank McCourt, HARPER PERENNIAL.

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"You live in one place. The next day you live somewhere else. It's not complicated. You get on a plane. You get off. People are always talking about name. Their houses. Their neighbourhoods. In movies, it's where they came from, where they came up".

Alexander Maksik, John Murray Publishers Ltd

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"The night I watch Athena Lia die, we're celebrating her TV deal with Netflix. Off the hat, for this story to make sense, you should know two things about Athena".

Rebecca F. Kuang, The Borough Press

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"My mother's a prostitute. Not the filthy, streetwalking kind. She's actually quite pretty, fairly well spoken, and has lovely clothes.

But she slaps with men for money or gifts, and according to the dictionary, that makes her a prostitute".

Ruta Sepetys, Penguin.

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"If I leave this house, it will be in handcuffs. I should have run for it while I had the chance. Now my shot is gone. Now that the police officers are in the house and they've discovered what's upstairs, there's no turning back".

Freida MCFadden, Grand Central Publishing.

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"Today I'm five. I was four last night going to sleep in wardrobe, but when I wake up in bed in the dawn I'm changed to five, abracadabra. Was I minus numbers?"

Emma Donoghue, Picador.

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"I was thirty-seven, single, unemployed, and depressed because in a couple of months I was going to be moving out of my studio apartment on East 23rd Street in Manhattan and in with my mother in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn".

Edited by Daniel Jones, Diana Editorial.

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What You are Looking for is in The Library

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What You are Looking for is in The Library

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"When Saya sends a teet to tell me she has a new boyfriend, I instantly write back: What's he like?"

Michiko Aoyama, Doubleday.

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"Sometime after he said the word, pause, I went mad and landed in the hospital. he did not say I don't ever want to see you again or it's over, but after thirty years of marriage pause was enough to torn me into a lunatic whose thoughts burst, ricochet and careered into one another like popcorn kerrels in a microwave bag".

Siri Hustvedt

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"There is a pile of clothing on the side of the train tracks. Light-blue cloth - a shirt, perhaps - jumbled uo with something dirty white".

Paula Hawkins

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THE QUIET DEATH OF MR WEBBER

"In Kellner Books on the Upper Side of New York City, a few minutes before his death, John Webber was reading the Count of Monte Cristo. He was sitting at his usual table in the middle of the store with his head over the back of his chair and the novel on the table in front of him. He stopped for a moment to take a sip of his coffee, closing the book and marking his place with a soft leather bookmark".

Gareth Brown

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"In the spring of her twenty-second year, Sumire fell in love for the first time in her life. An intense love, a veritable tornado sweeping across the plains-flattening everything in its path, tossing things up in the air, ripping them to shreds, crushing them to bits. The tornado's intensity doesn't abate for a second as it blasts across the ocean, laying waste to Angkor Wat, incinerating an Indian jungle, tigers and all, transforming itself into a Persian desert sandstorm, burying an exotic fortress city under a sea of sand. In short, a love of truly monumental proportions. The person she fell in love with happened to be seventeen years older than Sumire. And was married. And, I should add, was a woman. This is where it all began, and where it all wound up. Almost".

Haruki Murakami