How many times have I rewritten this opening sentence? The first line can be a beast to get right whether you’re composing a dating profile or drafting a workplace pitch – but when it comes to longform fiction, the stakes are vertiginous. Think of all that goes into writing a novel, from conception to final edit and beyond; then picture a prospective reader, besieged by competing demands from rival books, never mind films and binge-worthy boxsets. Imagine next that reader miraculously reaching for our author’s work, scanning its jacket blurb, opening the cover... Connections don’t come much more intimate than that between an author and their reader, and the first sentence is the writer’s chance to woo. Make it enticing enough – pack in sufficient intrigue, atmosphere and character, and do so in a voice that’s compelling enough – and the reader will read on. It’s no wonder Stephen King still spends months, sometimes years, getting his opening salvo exactly right.

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One writer who pulled off a hat-trick of near-ideal openers is Charles Dickens. There’s David Copperfield, of course (“Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show”), and A Christmas Carol is succinct perfection (“Marley was dead, to begin with”), but the show-stealer remains A Tale of Two Cities. Parodied, imitated, enduringly familiar even to those who’ve never read the novel, the line beginning “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” is a belter. A sustained rhetorical flourish, it primes us for the intensely contradictory world that characterises this story of love and revolution.