The opening chapter – it must really work, we’re taught. Maybe it’s the bit a potential agent would read. Maybe it’s the bit that a browser in a bookshop will look at. Maybe it’s the bit that will make a reader decide whether to carry on reading …
One of the most exciting opening chapters I’ve read is that of Enduring Love by Ian McEwan. This was recommended by our creative writing tutor, and as soon as I read it I could see why. Its dramatic account of a balloon ride gripped me. I think of it every time I drive down the escarpment on the M40 where it’s set (going towards Oxford, near Stokenchurch – as in the film shown during the opening credits of ‘The Vicar of Dibley’). Curiously, after that amazing start, the subject matter of the rest of the book drifts away from balloons. But that opening definitely made me read on.
The opening chapter of the book I’m reading now, Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, is another Must Read On one. Its description of the abandoned and overgrown Manderley is all the more evocative as it’s a dream, and reads with all the mystery and menace that a dream can have.
What opening chapters stay in your memory?
ninevoices 
A favourite opening of mine is that of the altogether delightful Behaving Badly by Catherine Heath. It ignores much of the advice authors are given about how to hook the reader, in that the first sentence is long, contains brackets, adverbs and a mention of the weather. Perhaps it is the final sentence in the initial paragraph that especially appeals, though perhaps this says more about me than I might like: ‘It had been a bad day for her; the passport photographs she had collected that morning from the slit of a kiosk in Streatham High Street had revealed to her that she had the face of a horse.’