Is that even the first line of the novel? It is preceded by the musings of both the Late Consumptive Usher to a Grammar School –

“The pale Usher—threadbare in coat, heart, body, and brain; I see him now. He was ever dusting his old lexicons and grammars, with a queer handkerchief, mockingly embellished with all the gay flags of all the known nations of the world. He loved to dust his old grammars; it somehow mildly reminded him of his mortality.”

It is however, so iconic an opening! And so beautifully evocative.

No wonder Patrick Ness opened his And The Ocean Was Our Sky – and inverted Moby Dick with “Call me Bathsheba.”

Another variant on Moby Dick, in Railsea, China Mieville reimagines the ocean as a semi-permeable earth populated by vast subterranean creatures, traversed by train tracks on which ride a multitude of trains.

And what an opening line!

And it continues just as powerfully:

“There he stands, swaying as utterly as any windblown sapling. He is quite, quite red. If only that were paint! Around each of his feet the red puddles; his clothes, whatever colour they were once, are now a thickening scarlet; his hair is stiff & drenched.”

Kiran Millwood Hargraves’ wonderful novel, The Mercies, is dominated by the dream with which it opens – a somewhat oddly prophetic dream for a character who generally resists superstition.

“She climbed down the cliff to its heaving body and rested her eye against its eye, wrapped her arms across the great stinking swell. There was nothing she could do for it but this.

“The men came scrambling down the black rock like dark, swift insects, glinting and hard-bodied with blades and scythes. They began to swing and cut before the whale was even dead.”

And another piece of advice to wannabe writers is to avoid starting with a dream sequence…

The Vegetarian is an unsettling and unnerving novel which has stayed in my mind for a long time. Ostensibly simple in terms of its plot – a woman chooses to become vegetarian – but the novel is so evocative and powerful….

“Before my wife turned vegetarian, I’d always thought of her as completely unremarkable in every way. To be frank, the first time I met her I wasn’t even attracted to her. Middling height; bobbed hair neither long nor short; jaundiced, sickly-looking skin; somewhat prominent cheekbones; her timid, sallow aspect told me all I needed to know. As she came up to the table where I was waiting, I couldn’t help but notice her shoes—the plainest black shoes imaginable. And that walk of hers—neither fast nor slow, striding nor mincing.”

Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall Trilogy is exquisite! But the opening of the second novel, Bring Up The Bodies is shockingly good.

They aren’t Thomas Cromwell’s children, just falcons named after them!

“He watches from horseback, acres of England stretching behind him; they drop, gilt-winged, each with a blood-filled gaze. Grace Cromwell hovers in thin air. She is silent when she takes her prey, silent as she glides to his fist. But the sounds she makes then, the rustle of feathers and the creak, the sigh and riffle of pinion, the small cluck-cluck from her throat, these are sounds of recognition, intimate, daughterly, almost disapproving. Her breast is gore-streaked and flesh clings to her claws.”

No, the opening of Queenie has nothing equestrian about it! Candice Carty-Williams’ novel revels in the intimate as she continues…

“I locked my phone and carried on looking at the ceiling before unlocking it and sending a follow-up “xx.” That would prove to Tom that I wasn’t as emotionally detached as he accuses me of being.

““Can you just bring your bottom riiiiight to the edge of the exam table?” the doctor asked as I inched myself down closer to her face. Honestly, I’ve no idea how they do it.

““Deep breath, please!” she said a bit too cheerfully, and with no further warning inserted what felt like the world’s least ergonomic dildo into me and moved it around like a joystick.”

Whole realms of fantasy and folklore and myth is encapsulated in that opening line. And The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern is as beautiful and haunting and evocative as that first line promises.

“No announcements precede it, no paper notices on downtown posts and billboards, no mentions or advertisements in local newspapers. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not.

“The towering tents are striped in white and black, no golds and crimsons to be seen. No color at all, save for the neighboring trees and the grass of the surrounding fields. Black-and-white stripes on grey sky; countless tents of varying shapes and sizes, with an elaborate wrought-iron fence encasing them in a colorless world.”

And speaking of wonderful and evocative arrivals, the opening of A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness is just sublime. That little “As they do.” is perfectly judged.

“Conor was awake when it came.

“He’d had a nightmare. Well, not a nightmare. The nightmare. The one he’d been having a lot lately. The one with the darkness and the wind and the screaming. The one with the hands slipping from his grasp, no matter how hard he tried to hold on. The one that always ended with–”

An absolute gut-wrenchingly emotional read

Akwaeke Emezi’s Pet is absolutely sublime – otherworldly hunters hauling themselves out of paintings, drawn by blood, to hunt the monsters that shouldn’t exist…

An important and visceral read.

“The city used to have them, of course—what city didn’t? They used to be everywhere, thick in the air and offices, in the streets and in people’s own homes. They used to be the police and teachers and judges and even the mayor; yeah, the mayor used to be a monster. Lucille has a different mayor now. This mayor is an angel; the last couple of mayors have all been angels. Not like a from-heaven, not-quite-real type of angel but a from-behind-and-inside-and-in-front-of-the-revolution, therefore-very-real type of angel.”

Why do so many of these chocies that resonate with me seem to have biblical, mythic resonances…?

Okri’s The Famished Road has stayed with me for years – the haunting tale of Azaro, an abiku who refuses to leave the land of the living for the spirit world…

“The river became a road and the road branched out to the whole world. And because the road was once a river it was always hungry.

“In that land of beginnings spirits mingled with the unborn. We could assume numerous forms. Many of us were birds. We knew no boundaries. There was much feasting, playing, and sorrowing. We feasted much because of the beautiful terrors of eternity. We played much because we were free. And we sorrowed much because there were always those amongst us who had just returned from the world of the Living.”

Lanny is such a remarkable novel – and Porter does something wonderful with voices, taking the natural speech around the village and turning them into something lyrical, something which summons and enriches the mythic, folkloric Dead Papa Toothwort…

“He lies down to hear hymns of the earth (there are none, so he hums), then he shrinks, cuts himself a mouth with a rusted ring pull and sucks up a wet skin of acid-rich mulch and fruity detritivores. He splits and wobbles, divides and reassembles, coughs up a plastic pot and a petrified condom, briefly pauses as a smashed fibreglass bath, stumbles and rips off the mask, feels his face and finds it made of long-buried tannic acid bottles. Victorian rubbish.”