Simon Dillon
2 min readMay 28, 2021

--

Excellent choices. Here are some of my favourite opening lines, which I think provide good marketing (much as I want to include The Handmaid's Tale, The Great Gatsby, and Moby Dick, I can't by your criteria):

Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier - "Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again."

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens – “Marley was dead, to begin with.”

The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman – “There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife.”

The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien – “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.”

1984 by George Orwell – “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”

The Ghost by Robert Harris – “The moment I heard how McAra died, I should have walked away.”

The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger – “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”

A Series of Unfortunate Events: The Bad Beginning by Lemony Snicket - "If you are interested in stories with happy endings, you would be better off reading some other book."

By the way, if you'll forgive the arrogance, here's the opening sentence to my most popular novel by far, Children of the Folded Valley, released in 2014, self-published. I've since written better novels (or at any rate, I think they are better), three of which have been traditionally published, but I think this opening sentence sums up the Children of the Folded Valley narrative fairly well: “We spend our adult lives trying to regain what we lost in childhood."

--

--

Simon Dillon
Simon Dillon

Written by Simon Dillon

Novelist and Short Story-ist. Film and Book Lover. If you cut me, I bleed celluloid and paper pulp. Blog: www.simondillonbooks.wordpress.com

Responses (2)