The 10 Best Opening Lines in Award-Winning Fiction

A first sentence is the only part of a book everyone reads. It has to earn the second sentence, and it has to do it before the reader has agreed to anything—no accumulated goodwill, no invested hours, no plot yet to speak of. It is the most exposed writing in any novel.

So this list is ranked on one criterion, and it is a demanding one: how hard does the sentence pull a reader who knows nothing about the book? Not how elegantly it is built, not how much it means once you've finished. A first line's job is to be irresistible on contact, to someone standing in a shop with no context and no patience. Some of the most sophisticated openings in literature are slow payers, and they place lower here because of it.

Length turned out to be almost irrelevant. The shortest sentence on this list places ninth; a twenty-seven-word sentence places second. Every book below links to its Literary Laureates record, where you can see its full award history.

A note on scope: our records currently run from 2005 onward, so the canonical openings of earlier literature aren't eligible here.

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10. Gilead — Marilynne Robinson

Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, 2005

"I told you last night that I might be gone sometime, and you said, Where, and I said, To be with the Good Lord, and you said, Why, and I said, Because I'm old, and you said, I don't think you're old."

Forty-two words, and possibly the most moving opening in our records—but it asks for patience before it gives anything back. An old minister is writing to his young son, and Robinson supplies no quotation marks, just commas, one clause folding into the next the way remembered speech actually arrives.

The child's last line does everything. I don't think you're old. It is the whole tragedy of the book delivered by someone too young to know he's delivering it. But you have to stay with the sentence to the end to feel it, and a reader skimming a first page may not. Gilead opens like a door easing shut, not like a hand on your arm.

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9. Wolf Hall — Hilary Mantel

Booker Prize, 2009 · National Book Critics Circle Award, 2009

"So now get up."

The best-constructed sentence on this list, and by this ranking's standard, one of the weaker hooks. Both things are true.

The construction is extraordinary. So is a conjunction, which means the novel opens on the second half of a sentence whose first half you never receive—something has already happened, and the book begins after it. Now tells you this is not the first time, converting an event into a pattern in one syllable. And with no attribution, the imperative points three ways at once: the father's command, the narration's instruction, and briefly yours.

But a reader meeting those four words cold gets disorientation first and meaning second. The payoff is real and it is enormous, and it arrives on page two rather than in the sentence itself. Wolf Hall rewards the reader who has already committed. Mantel has said the line arrived in her head one morning and it took her a while to realise it wasn't an instruction to get on with her day.

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8. The Road — Cormac McCarthy

Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, 2007

"When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him."

This one seduces rather than seizes. No commas, no subordination you can feel—just clause after clause in the dark, the sentence groping forward the way the hand does. McCarthy withholds both names and gives you only he and the child, which is how the novel will regard them for three hundred pages.

The verb tense is the quiet masterstroke: he'd reach out—habitual, repeated, every night. You learn that this has been happening a long time and will keep happening, which tells you more about the world of The Road than any description of the ash could. Quiet mastery, though—it works on a reader already leaning in, which is a different thing from making them lean.

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7. The Vegetarian — Han Kang

International Booker Prize, 2016 (translated by Deborah Smith)

"Before my wife turned vegetarian, I'd always thought of her as completely unremarkable in every way."

Here the pull starts. The sentence is faintly funny and slightly wrong in a way you can feel immediately: something has happened to this marriage, the husband has a verdict about his wife, and the verdict is unkind. You want to know which of them is the problem.

The misdirection is the hook. You think you are being given information about a wife; you are being given information about a narrator. The Vegetarian spends the rest of its length dismantling the word "unremarkable."

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6. Demon Copperhead — Barbara Kingsolver

Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, 2023 · Women's Prize for Fiction, 2023

"First, I got myself born."

Five words that hand you a voice instantly—the narrator's class, his region, and his entire relationship to his own life. "Got myself born" is a boy claiming credit for the one thing nobody arranges for themselves, and in a novel about children for whom no adult is arranging anything, that isn't a joke. It's the thesis.

It's also a deliberate echo: Dickens opened David Copperfield with a narrator formally recording the fact of his birth, and Demon Copperhead answers with a kid who elbows onto the page. It grabs through sheer charm—you like him before you know anything about him, which is exactly the trap Kingsolver needs you in.

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5. The Year of Magical Thinking — Joan Didion

National Book Award for Nonfiction, 2005

"Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends."

The only nonfiction on this list, and it stops you where you stand. The second sentence is almost a repetition of the first—the kind of thing an editor would ordinarily cut. Didion keeps it because the repetition is the meaning: this is what a mind does when it cannot move past a fact, saying the thing again, slightly differently, as if the right phrasing might make it survivable.

Then the third sentence lands the specific detail—dinner—and the abstraction becomes a room in a house on a particular evening. No reader needs context for The Year of Magical Thinking. Everyone has sat down to dinner.

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4. The Sellout — Paul Beatty

National Book Critics Circle Award, 2015 · Booker Prize, 2016

"This may be hard to believe, coming from a black man, but I've never stolen anything."

Beatty sets a trap and springs it on the reader rather than the narrator. If you find the claim surprising, you have just been shown something about yourself; if you don't, you have still had to notice the possibility. Either way you are implicated before the end of the first line, and that is an extremely difficult thing to walk away from.

The grab here is confrontational rather than seductive, which makes it fast. The Sellout became the first American novel to win the Booker Prize, a year after taking the National Book Critics Circle Award.

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3. The Fifth Season — N. K. Jemisin

Hugo Award for Best Novel, 2016

"Let's start with the end of the world, why don't we? Get it over with and move on to more interesting things."

Most apocalyptic novels build toward the catastrophe. Jemisin waves it away as throat-clearing—and in doing so promises that whatever she considers more interesting will be worth staying for. It's an audacious bargain to strike on page one, and the reader takes it immediately because the alternative is not finding out.

The direct address does as much as the content: chatty, conversational, faintly impatient with you. Being spoken to personally by a narrator is one of the fastest hooks in fiction, and The Fifth Season opens by doing it. The novel began Jemisin's unprecedented run of three consecutive Hugo Awards for Best Novel.

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2. Milkman — Anna Burns

Booker Prize, 2018 · National Book Critics Circle Award, 2018

"The day Somebody McSomebody put a gun to my breast and called me a cat and threatened to shoot me was the same day the milkman died."

Twenty-seven words containing an assault, an absurdity, and a death—and the grammar treats all three as equally ordinary. That flatness is what makes it impossible to put down. This is a narrator for whom violence is scheduling information, something that happened on the same day as something else, and you cannot read that sentence without needing to know what kind of place produces that tone.

"Called me a cat" is the detail that seals it. It is so strange, and so casually dropped between a gun and a death, that the reader has no choice but to continue. And no one has a name: in Milkman, set during the Troubles, a proper noun tells people which side you're on, so the novel refuses to supply any. The first sentence establishes that rule before you know it is a rule—but crucially, it grabs you whether or not you notice.

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1. The Sympathizer — Viet Thanh Nguyen

Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, 2016

"I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces. Perhaps not surprisingly, I am also a man of two minds."

Nothing on this list works this fast on a reader with no context. Thirteen words give you a narrator, a profession, a psychology and a confession, and not one of them requires anything that comes later.

The mechanics are perfect. Four nouns escalate in strangeness—spy, sleeper, spook—and then the pivot: "a man of two faces" reads as the fourth item in a list of espionage terms until the second sentence turns it into a psychological condition. The confession stops being about tradecraft and becomes about a self. You have been told the book's entire subject and made to feel you worked it out yourself.

Nguyen has said he spent months on the opening before arriving at this one, and the joinery shows. Every idea in The Sympathizer—divided loyalty, divided country, divided narrator—is pre-loaded into two sentences that read like a shrug. It is the rare opening that is both the most sophisticated in the room and the most immediately gripping, which is why it takes the top place on a list that usually forces a choice between the two.

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Two that nearly made it

Hamnet — Maggie O'Farrell (Women's Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award, 2020): "A boy is coming down a flight of stairs." Present tense, no name, no context—a camera switched on. O'Farrell has said this sentence unlocked the novel for her.

The Underground Railroad — Colson Whitehead (National Book Award 2016, Pulitzer Prize 2017): "The first time Caesar approached Cora about running north, she said no." The words the first time do it—you learn there will be a second, and the refusal becomes a countdown.

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What the strongest hooks have in common

Ranking on pure pull rather than craft surfaced a few patterns:

1. They are legible on contact. Every opening in the top five can be fully understood by someone who knows nothing. The lower entries all ask the reader to hold something in suspension first—which is a legitimate technique, and a slower one.
2. They implicate the reader. Beatty accuses you, Jemisin talks to you, Didion describes something you have done. Second person and direct address are the fastest routes into a stranger's attention.
3. Voice beats event. Nothing actually happens in Nguyen's opening or Kingsolver's. Both outrank a sentence in which a man wakes in a post-apocalyptic forest, because a narrator you want to spend time with is a stronger hook than an incident you have no stake in yet.
4. Length is close to irrelevant. Four words place ninth; twenty-seven place second. Density and legibility decide it, not brevity.

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Conclusion: the sentence that has to work hardest

No prize gives an award for a first line. Judges assess whole books, and none of the citations for these ten mention their openings.

But you are not a prize judge. You are, most likely, deciding whether to spend eight hours with a stranger—and the first sentence is the only evidence you have that's free. Ranked that way, the winners aren't always the finest sentences. They're the ones you cannot put back on the shelf.

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Explore the current Literary Laureates dataset by award, year, or author search. Award records reflect the prizes currently tracked and will expand over time. Quoted passages appear for the purpose of commentary and criticism.