How many classic novels can you or your group identify just by the opening lines?
- “All children, except one, grow up.”
- “He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone 84 days now without taking a fish.”
- “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness…”
- “Serene was a word you could put to Brooklyn, New York.”
- “Call me Ishamael.”
- “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.”
- “Amerigo Bonasera sat in New York Criminal Court Number 3 and waited for justice…”
- “A throng of bearded men, in sad-coloured garments and gray steeple-crowned hats, intermixed with women, some wearing hoods, and others bareheaded, was assembled in front of a wooden edifice, the door of which was heavily timbered with oak, and studded with iron spikes.”
- “The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting.”
- “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
Answers: 1. Peter Pan, JM Barrie, 2. The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway, 3. A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens, 4. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith, 5. Moby Dick, Herman Melville, 6. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen, 7. The Godfather, Mario Puzo, 8. The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne, 9. The Red Badge of Courage, Stephen Crane, 10. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
