Here are first lines of novels by my favourite Canadian authors. These aren’t necessarily the best first lines, but they are all by great authors. Can you match the author to the first line?
All night long, Hooker Winslow’s eyes were open.
Marie Ursule woke up this morning knowing what morning it was and that it might be her last.
She stands up in the garden where she has been working and looks into the distance.
Lydia leans back to laugh at something Wilf Jardine says.
The pizza man.
“We’ll just have to sell him,” I remember my mother saying with finality.
My lifelong involvement with Mrs Dempster began at 5:58 o’clock p.m. on 27 December 1908, at which time I was ten years and seven months old.
Northwest of Montreal, through a valley always in sight of the low mountains of the Laurentian Shield, the Ottawa River flows out of Protestant Ontario into Catholic Quebec.
Hank Peterson went into the bedroom of his house one Friday morning about 6:30, carrying a shotgun, and when he came out the lives of everyone in Red Rock had changed forever.
Looking back on it now, I can see there were signs.
Jerry was fifty years old when his daughters denounced him, as he had always known they would.
He was going into the house through the woodshed when he heard his name mentioned.
Authors listed alphabetically, need hints, look at the book title:
David Arnason, King Jerry
Dionne Brand, at the full and change of the moon
Robertson Davies, Fifth Business
Timothy Findley, The Last of the Crazy People
Robert Kroetsch, The Puppeteer
Hugh MacLennan, Two Solitudes
Alistair MacLeod, The Lost Salt Gift of Blood, “In the Fall”
Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient
Al Purdy, A Splinter in the Heart
Diane Schoemperlen, Our Lady of the Lost and Found
Wayne Tefs, Red Rock
Michael Winter, This All Happened
If you were going to write a novel, what would the first line be?