First Lines: W.G. Sebald - Austerlitz

 

In the second half of the 1960s I traveled repeatedly from England to Belgium, partly for study purposes, partly for other reasons which were never entirely clear to me, staying sometimes for just one or two days, sometimes for several weeks.

First Lines: Philip Pullman - Northern Lights

 

Three miles up the river Thames from the centre of Oxford, some distance from where the great colleges of Jordan, Gabriel, Balliol, and two dozen others contended for mastery in the boat races, out where the city was only a collection of towers and spires in the distance over the misty levels of Port Meadow, there stood the priory of Godstow, where the gentle nuns went about their holy business; and on the opposite bank from the priory there was an inn called the Trout.

First Lines: Angela Carter - Wise Children

 

Why is London like Budapest?

First Lines: Salman Rushdie - Haroun and the Sea of Stories

 

There was once, in the country of Alifbay, a sad city, the saddest of cities, a city so ruinously sad that it had forgotten its name.

First Lines: Milan Kundera - The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

 

In February 1948, the Communist leader Klement Gottwald stepped out on the balcony of a Baroque palace in Prague to harangue hundreds of thousands of citizens massed in Old Town Square.

First Lines: Kazuo Ishiguro - An Artist of the Floating World

 

If on a sunny day you climb the steep path leading up from the little wooden bridge still referred to around here as 'the Bridge of Hesitation', you will not have to walk far before the roof of my house becomes visible between the tops of two gingko trees.

First Lines: Roald Dahl - The BFG

 

"P...Please don't eat me," Sophie stammered.

First Lines: Alasdair Gray - Lanark: A Life in Four Books

 

The Elite Café was entered by a staircase from the foyer of a cinema.

First Lines: Marilynne Robinson - Housekeeping

 

My name is Ruth.

First Lines: JM Coetzee - Waiting For the Barbarians

 

I have never seen anything like it: two little discs of glass suspended in front of his eyes in loos of wire.

First Lines: VS Naipaul - A Bend in the River

 

The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.

First Lines: Italo Calvino - If on a Winter's Night a Traveller

 

You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel,  If on a Winter's Night a Traveller.

First Lines: Norman Mailer - The Executioner's Song

 

Brenda was six when she fell out of the apple tree.

First Lines: Beryl Bainbridge - The Bottle Factory Outing

 

The hearse stood outside the block of flats, waiting for the old lady.

First Lines: Elizabeth Taylor - Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont

 

Mrs Palfrey first came to the Claremont Hotel on a Sunday afternoon in January.

First Lines: Muriel Spark - The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

 

The boys, as they talked to the girls from Marcia Blaine School, stood on the far side of their bicycles holding the handlebars, which established a protective fence of bicycle between the sexes, and the impression that at any moment the boys were likely to be away.

First Lines: Chinua Achebe - Things Fall Apart

 

Okonkwo was well known throughout the nine villages and even beyond.

First Lines: Günter Grass - The Tin Drum

 

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.

First Lines: Graham Greene - The Quiet American

 

After dinner I sat and waited for Pyle in my room over the rue Catinat; he had said, 'I'll be with you at latest by ten," and when midnight struck I couldn't stay quiet any longer and went down into the street.

First Lines: Kingsley Amis - Lucky Jim

 

'They made a silly mistake, though,' the Professor of History said, and his smile, as Dixon watched, gradually sank beneath the surface of his features at the memory.