August 14, 2025 by Jess Peck, Dreamland Staff Picks

Hi, friends — let’s start with a quick pop quiz on great first lines. They’re the doorway into a book, the little spark that tells you what kind of world you’re about to step into. Some stick with you forever. See how many of these famous first lines you can match to their novels:

“Call me Ishmael.” 

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” 

“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” 

“It was a pleasure to burn.” 

“It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs…”

“I live in the Cube.” 

Think you’ve got them all? Here’s one that might be new to you, but it’s worth pausing for: “I recently sent a letter to a terrorist I used to know.” 

This is the opening line of V. V. Ganeshananthan’s Brotherless Night. Ohh, this one got me. It’s immediate and fully loaded. “Terrorist” is a word we’re used to seeing in headlines — distant, scary, impersonal — and here it’s paired with “I used to know,” which pulls us right into the narrator’s own life. In one sentence, you know this is a story where the big, unthinkable questions of war, oppression, and loyalty are bound up in personal history and family, where every choice is muddled and nothing is simple. 

The novel follows sixteen-year-old Sashikala “Sashi” Kulenthiren, a young Tamil woman in 1980s Sri Lanka whose plan to become a doctor is upended by the Sri Lankan Civil War. Her four brothers are pulled into the conflict in different ways — some joining the Tamil Tigers (a militant separatist group fighting for an independent Tamil state), others leaving home altogether. Sashi is left to figure out how to keep moving through a life that’s suddenly full of gaps. She works as a medic in makeshift field hospitals, patching up whoever comes through the door, seeing things she can’t unsee, and wrestling with what “doing good” means when right and wrong start looking too much alike. 

The writing is careful and close, with a kind of steady attention that makes it impossible to look away. This is a story about staying alive, about the pull and weight of family, and about how telling the truth can be as dangerous as it is necessary. Like that first line, it hooks you with the small, human details, then leaves you sitting with questions that don’t have clean answers. 

Ganeshananthan knows exactly what she’s doing with that first sentence — it’s the kind of opener that makes you sit up straighter, slow down, and look closer, and the rest of the book keeps asking you to do the same. Plus, it’s not just me who loved this book: “Brotherless Night” won both the 2024 Women’s Prize for Fiction and the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction. 

Happy Reading! 

Jess 

Quiz answers: 

“Call me Ishmael.” — “Moby-Dick,” Herman Melville

“It was the best of times…” — “A Tale of Two Cities,” Charles Dickens 

“It was a bright cold day in April…” — “1984,” George Orwell 

“It was a pleasure to burn.” — “Fahrenheit 451,” Ray Bradbury 

“It was a queer, sultry summer…” — “The Bell Jar,” Sylvia Plath 

“I live in the Cube.” — “Against The Loveless World,” Susan Abulhawa (which, honestly, isn’t a super-famous opening line either — but it got me. You should probably add this one to your stack while you’re at it.)