“Every crease is a story.”
Opening Lines #79 · Sunday, 18 October 2026
Five first sentences from public-domain classics. Which book does each one open?
Replaying an archived puzzle. Play today’s
Line 1
“When Caroline Meeber boarded the afternoon train for Chicago, her total outfit consisted of a small trunk, a cheap imitation alligator-skin satchel, a small lunch in a paper box, and a yellow leather snap purse, containing her ticket, a scrap of paper with her sister’s address in Van Buren Street, and four dollars in money.”
Line 2
“The story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless, but except the obvious remark that it was gruesome, as, on Christmas Eve in an old house, a strange tale should essentially be, I remember no comment uttered till somebody happened to say that it was the only case he had met in which such a visitation had fallen on a child.”
Line 3
“Mrs. Ferrars died on the night of the 16th–17th September—a Thursday.”
Line 4
“My dear wife Carrie and I have just been a week in our new house, ‘The Laurels,’ Brickfield Terrace, Holloway—a nice six-roomed residence, not counting basement, with a front breakfast-parlour.”
Line 5
“Of Man’s first disobedience, and the fruit / Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste / Brought death into the world, and all our woe,”
Archive · Your stats · First lines are from works published before 1930.
Read the opening sentence and choose the novel it belongs to. Look for the narrator, setting and tone as clues. A remembered first sentence can help, but a line can also be a starting point for finding a new book to read.
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