Top 5 Tuesday: Opening Lines

Top 5 Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by Bionic Bookworm and for this week, we have been asked to make a list of our top 5 opening lines. It is a topic, I covered a few years earlier too. At that time I made a list of 13 top opening lines. Those were the books I hadn’t read but was intrigued by their opening lines. A few years down the line, despite my plans to read them asap, all those books remain unread except for one which I discovered that I had read years earlier and had forgotten totally. That list is here.

For this list however, I have chosen opening lines from the books that I have read and written about on this blog (Clicking on the title will take you to the review).

Here they are in no particular order:

There are times when my father’s absence is as heavy as a child sitting on my chest. Other times I can barely recall the exact features of his face and must bring out the photographs I keep in an old envelope in the drawer of my bedside table.

Anatomy of a Disappearance, Hisham Matar

Do You Believe in Ghosts? That’s the sort of question you ask yourself at that part of the night when the ordinary noises of the day have eased into such a deep quiet that it’s impossible to sleep.

The Washer of the Dead, Venita Coelho

“On the day they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at five-thirty in the morning to wait for the boat the bishop was coming on”.

Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I stopped waging war on the ants after I got out of the hospital. I don’t kill them anymore.

The Purple Room, Mauro Casiraghi

“There was a man lived by a churchyard – ” is an intriguing beginning for a story left unfinished.

The Burning Court, John Dickson Carr

Above all, I have a score to settle.

The Last Labyrinth, Arun Joshi

Ah well! Six! Are you tempted?

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Here’s our hostess Shanah’s post for the week.