First lines

“Griselda de Reptonville did not know what love was until she joined one of Mrs. Hatch’s famous house parties at Beams, and there met Leander.”

Robert Aickman
“The Late Breakfasters”

First lines

“The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.”

Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray

First lines

“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.”

J D Salinger
The Catcher in the Rye

First lines

“The Duchy of Grand Fenwick lies in a precipitous fold of the northern Alps and embraces in its tumbling landscape portions of three valleys, a river, one complete mountain with an elevation of two thousand feet and a castle.”

Leonard Wibberley
“The Mouse That Roared”

First lines

“Granted: I am an inmate of a mental hospital; my keeper is watching me, he never lets me out of his sight; there’s a peephole in the door, and my keeper’s eye is the shade of brown that can never see through a blue-eyed type like me.”

Günter Grass
The Tin Drum

First lines

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

Sylvia Plath

The Bell Jar

First lines…

“Speak of the Devil,” whispered La Fosse in my ear, and, moved by the words and by the significance of his glance, I turned in my chair.”

“Bardelys the Magnificent”
Rafael Sabatini