First lines for novelists are a bit like penalty kicks for goalies, a heart-stopping opportunity for a great performance, writes Robert McCrum. It's your show, and there's no going back. More than that, a good first line, like Stravinsky's reedy bassoon in The Rite of Spring, or the clarinet glissando that launches Rhapsody in Blue, becomes an advertisement for what's to follow. In storytelling, a first line plays many parts. It can seduce, or intrigue; advertise, baffle, or inspire. Whatever else it does, it must button-hole the gentle reader but – and this is the tricky part – it must not try too hard. Advice to would-be novelists: avoid that "Look, Mum, I'm dancing" first line. Readers always know when there's too much spin on the ball.

Traditional lists of first lines tend to rehearse the famous openings of Austen, Dickens and Melville ("It is a truth universally acknowledged…"; "It was the best of times…"; "Call me Ishmael"). By contrast, our catalogue is new. These Booker prize longlist writers have rather dodged Huckleberry Finn, Jane Eyre and To the Lighthouse. Anyway, who needs the classics when there's so much contemporary variety on offer? Or forgotten gems? For instance, Dodie Smith's opening to I Capture The Castle, "I write this sitting in the kitchen sink." As Oscar Wilde put it – but not in a first line – "We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." It's the writer's job to be quotable.

(HARVEST)

"I was born in the Year 1632, in the City of York, of a good Family, tho' not of that Country, my Father being a Foreigner of Bremen, who settled first at Hull; He got a good Estate by Merchandise, and leaving off his Trade, lived afterward at York, from whence he had married my Mother, whose Relations were named Robinson, a very good Family in that Country, and from whom I was called Robinson Kreutznaer; but by the usual Corruption of Words in England, we are now called, nay we call our selves, and write our Name Crusoe, and so my Companions always call'd me."

Robinson Crusoe (Daniel Defoe)

It's a sentence comprised of six equally weighted clauses, little more than a list but loaded with information and confident in its detail – a date, three cities, a bit of family background, and absolutely no pretension. But it's as compelling and as comforting in its directness as Once Upon a Time. A good story's coming up is what it guarantees. It drew me in as a boy; I've loved the novel since; and that dull, matter-of- fact opening sentence is still a thrilling one for me.

(WE NEED NEW NAMES)

"We wanted more."

We the Animals (Justin Torres)

Just three words, almost as if to say words are expensive, but the line still manages to do so much as Torres captures the urgency that pervades the story of three young brothers and their dysfunctional family. We wanted more; besides introducing us to the boys as a unit, the line a t once speaks to a demand, a need, and a desire, it's punch quickly growing from the use of repetition as we are plunged into the chaos of the brothers' lives. The novel keeps looking back to where we started – the first line, and wanting more.

(UNEXPLODED)

"124 was spiteful. Full of a baby's venom."

Beloved (Toni Morrison)

I love the sound of the line – the first few notes of the novel's music – because, like many readers, I'm seduced through the ear. "Spiteful" carries a menacing hint of itself in it sound. A "baby's venom" is an irresistible oxymoron, one I hear before I understand.

The line is half revelation and half riddle. Who or what is 124? (124 Bluestone Road, the home of Sethe, a "fugitive" slave, her children and her ailing mother-in-law, Baby Suggs.) Which baby? ("Not a house in the country ain't packed to its rafters with some dead Negro's grief. We lucky this ghost is a baby.") Spiteful, how exactly? It's a masterly beginning to a story that is haunted, almost between its sentences, by grief; yet the world of Beloved is – remarkably – rich and big with life.

(THE TESTAMENT OF MARY)

"If I had not been so wicked, the possession of devout and God-fearing parents, together with the favour of God's grace, would have been enough to make me good."

The Life of Saint Teresa of Avila by Herself

This is the first sentence, as translated by J M Cohen, of the book, which was finished in 1565. In the original Spanish, the sentences have a lovely density and a wonderful control of cadence and tone. I will leave it to God, at least for the moment, to decide on Teresa's saintliness, but I think even the Almighty will have to agree that she sure could write. Her prose style, her way of ending chapters and opening new ones, the complex way in which she presents herself to the world, mean that she is a lesson to us all. I have great devotion to her.

(THE SPINNING HEART)

"'I am damned,' thinks Bunny Munro in a sudden moment of self-awareness reserved for those who are soon to die."

The Death of Bunny Munro (Nick Cave)

It's not always a great idea to give away a book's ending in its opening line, but the title of Cave's second novel leaves nothing to the imagination. There's an implausibility about the opening thought simply because of the name of the person having it. Bunny Munro? It's a great name, but doesn't evoke insightfulness or self-awareness. You think of someone cartoonish, made-up, tacky. But you know it's ridiculous to jump to such conclusions and you suddenly have to know who Bunny Munro is and why he thinks he's damned and what's going to happen to him.

(TRANSATLANTIC)

"We shot dogs."

Redeployment (Phil Klay)

(to be published in the UK early next year)

The thrill and terror of a first line is that it can go absolutely anywhere. It's a doorway. After that the house takes shape. I have seldom been so stunned by an opening line as when I opened an application for the creative writing programme at Hunter College, New York, and read the line: "We shot dogs." What made this all the more intriguing was that the application was from a young former marine, Phil Klay, who had served in Iraq and was now looking to a career in literature. The line is simple of course. Three words. Ten letters. It is shocking and direct and intimate and rhythmically violent. I knew almost instantly this was a writer with a future. "We shot dogs" plunges the reader into a world that is urgent, intimate, informative – and it teaches us to how to read the rest of the collection.

(THE MARRYING OF CHANI KAUFMAN)

"His children are falling from the sky."

Bring Up The Bodies (Hilary Mantel)

The image is so starkly powerful and enigmatic. Who can resist it? I had to stop and reread it when I saw it the first time. The line is bewildering and mysterious and, on the surface, a fitting one for the swirling, shifting politics of Thomas Cromwell and the court of Henry VIII, where nobody can be trusted and nothing is what it seems. Is it a dream? Whose children are they? How can children fall from the sky? The book is the sequel to Mantel's Man Booker winning Wolf Hall. You might assume it would be a tall order to follow, but, in one sentence, she manages to catapults the reader straight back to the world she has so brilliantly drawn. Then there's another layer to the line. Reading on, you realise "his children" are actually birds of prey swooping for the kill, or returning to their master (Cromwell), their breasts blood-stained. Cromwell has named these birds after his dead daughters (lost to the plague) and immediately Mantel creates sympathy in the reader by humanising her anti-hero. We learn him from the inside out.

(THE LOWLAND)

"I stand at the window of this great house in the south of France as night falls, the night which is leading me to the most terrible morning of my life."

Giovanni's Room (James Baldwin)

Each element of this opening both orients and bewilders. Who is the narrator? What brings him to this window, this great house? How is it that we know that neither the house nor the country is his own? Why will the morning be so terrible? The effect is at once specific and mysterious, arresting, unsettling. the principle tension is one of time: the present moment at the window, the past journey that has brought the narrator there, and the fateful morning that awaits him. Are the events of this morning intuited? Or has the morning already come and gone, and are we in the realm of memory? Are we to move forward or backward? The cadence is calm, unhurried, but undermined by a sense of foreboding, of inevitability.

(FIVE STAR BILLIONAIRE)

"For half a century, the good women of Pont l'Évêque envied Madame Aubain her maidservant Felicité."

A Simple Heart (Gustave Flaubert)

This simplest of opening lines reflects all the beauty, poise and precision of the story that follows, the tale of the humble servant Felicité who devotes her life to Madame Aubain. At under 40 pages, it isn't long, but distils the enormous complexities of love and pain into a small, gem-like narrative. It is a story built on quiet, everyday detail, contained largely in the small town of Pont l'Évêque and the surrounding villages. Nothing dramatic happens - there are no sweeping romances or grand battles, and all the major events in the story, such as the gradual, deaths of those who fill Felicité's life, are rendered with such quiet grace that the tone is never altered. Now and then the outside world insists itself upon this world – the July Revolution and voyages to the Americas are mentioned – but nothing really punctures the perfect smallness of Felicité's existence. Yet, from the first to last lines, her story seems to hold a universe of understanding; of devotion, sacrifice, hope – failed and fulfilled – of the human condition.

(A TALE FOR THE TIME BEING)

"The old ram stands looking down over the rockslides, stupidly triumphant."

Grendel (John Gardner)

The line, which has turned you back in time toward an age of old rams and rockslides, leaves you now at the base of the scree, staring upward. Even if you've never looked an old ram in the eye, you can understand the contempt and frustration in the tone of Gardner's existential monster. Grendel howls, hurls stones, and it's almost more than I can bear not to offer up the rest of the paragraph, which gets better and better, culminating in the final line: "But the ram stays: the season is upon us. And so begins the twelfth year of my idiotic war."

(THE KILLS)

This is tricky. In memory, the beginnings I remember aren't the actual beginnings. Lynne Tillman's No Lease on Life doesn't start with "Any moron can hit a car with a garbage can," but is close enough; it has sound, event, and intention. Similarly, Alain Robbe-Grillet's "It was as if no one had heard," (The Voyeur) is simple and rich, and the first line I remember best. Don DeLillo's opening sequences are startling. "He speaks in your voice, American, and there's a shine in his eye that's halfway hopeful," (Underworld), is mightily handsome. It has muscle, and is seductive. All of these involve a tumble or a dive, and you're immediately committed. Or there's the classic plain statement. Camilo Cela's, "I am not, sir, a bad person…" (The Family of Pascual Duarte); Günter Grass, "Granted, I'm an inmate in a mental institution…" (The Tin Drum), or best, Alan Warner, "He'd cut His throat with the knife. He'd near chopped off His hand with the meat cleaver. He couldn't object so I lit a Silk Cut." (Morvern Callar). It's dynamite, dark and funny, and those capitals, His, are unnerving. So it is either DeLillo or Janice Galloway (Foreign Parts). "They got off the bus and she was giggling," because it's active and alive, and the truth is, of all the starts I've looked at, that first line reminds me of how fond I am of this book and its inventions.

(ALMOST ENGLISH)

"Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable November weather."

Bleak House (Charles Dickens)

The glory of Bleak House, like most great novels, is in the combination of audacious scope and telling detail. In Anna Karenina it's Vronsky's calf muscle; in Bleak House Dickens' genius is clearest in the mud, the dust, the discomfort with which daily life is fraught. The megalosaurus wading through the rainy streets of London is inspired, but it is the compassion, the omniscience, the microscopic observation, all displayed on its very first page, which make Bleak House a masterpiece.'

(THE LUMINARIES)

"They have said that we owe allegiance to Safety, that he is our Red Cross who will provide us with ointment and bandages for our wounds and remove the foreign ideas the glass beads of fantasy the bent hairpins of unreason embedded in our minds."

Faces in the Water (Janet Frame)

Never has an opening of a book arrested me so absolutely than when I first encountered Janet Frame's extraordinary Faces in the Water. Frame's authority is a kind of audacity, but a sly audacity, strangely wistful, strangely desperate. I love the archness of "they have said" and the elevation of Safety as "he" – the first impression is of stylistic confidence and purpose – but the oddness of "glass beads of fantasy" and "bent hairpins of unreason" is unsettling, both to the reader and the sense of the sentence; the air of confidence doesn't ebb exactly, but it alters. I love, too, the way the rest of the sentence unfolds breathlessly, unencumbered by punctuation.

Join the debate, and tell us your favourite first lines, in the comments section, below.