small>Racing to the end: a visitor to 2004's rainy Hay-on-Wye book festival. Photograph: Andrew Fox

"It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan."

Sounds familiar? It's probably not as recognisable as "Call Me Ishmael", the line which starts the book. It's curious, given the importance attached to a book's opener, that the last line is largely ignored. After all, it's the last impression you have of the book - the sentence that brings several hundred pages to a close. People's last words are prized and, even in cinema - think Casablanca and Psycho - final lines are important. Why not in literature?

The American Book Review is running a competition to change our perception of the last line and has asked its readers to nominate their favourites. The shortlist is 100-strong, with an eventual winner to be decided next month. Among the choices are ones which need no explaining ("And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God bless us, every one", "The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which").

Most are less well known but equally impressive. Saul Bellow finished The Adventures of Augie March with: "Columbus too thought he was a flop, probably, when they sent him back in chains. Which didn't prove there was no America." It's a wry smile to end on and one of the more upbeat sentences on the list.

Last lines can be optimistic ("After all, tomorrow is another day" - Gone With The Wind), sorrowful ("It was a fine cry - loud and long - but it had no bottom and it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow" - Sula) or a moment of revelation (To The Lighthouse's "Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision").

The list has some glaring omissions. For one, there's no Bell Jar ("The eyes and faces all turned themselves towards me, and guiding myself by them, as by a magical thread, I stepped into the room") and not enough from the last twenty years or from outside the US, but then the journal's title suggests where its allegiances lie.

To me, the perfect ending depends on the book. Sometimes a neat conclusion is fitting (a who-dunnit, for example) and sometimes it's a cop-out, especially if it's a "Happily ever after" line. An open ending can leave the book lingering in your mind, or be straightforwardly annoying. I'm sure I'm not the only one left fuming by The Crimson Petal and the White, a book which stops suddenly, after 900 pages, in the middle of high drama with "an abrupt parting, I know, but that's the way it always is, isn't it?"

I'm happy to give anyone else the last word on this subject.