Well – actually the excellent editrix, and hippophile, Imogen Cooper. This week’s #GEAQA (Golden Egg Academy question & answer session on Twitter) was all about first lines. We had such fun posing them and guessing, I thought some of you might like a re-run on here. Then I thought about having a teeny competition…

So here goes:

1. Find out the writer and the title of the work that these first lines come from.
2. Send your answers to kmlockwoodAThotmail.co.uk – I promise not to use your address for anything else.
3. All of these are either classics I read when I was a child or teen, or contemporary-ish 21st century works. Can you spot anything else about them as a collection? Other than I love them. {tiebreaker}

Answers next week – after I’ve emailed the winner.

1. Taran wanted to make a sword, but Coll charged with the practical side of his imagination, decided on horseshoes.
2. It starts and ends with the knife.
3. There was an ash tree in the churchyard of Hale Magna with a crow’s nest at the top.
4. Even before she came to Belton, Minty Cane knew she was a witch or something like that.
5. Stag’s Leap. It felt like the edge of the world, nothing beyond but the fall of rock, depth and fierce winds.
6. In their ruddy jackets of leather that reached to their knees, the men of Erl appeared before their lord, the stately white-haired man in his long red room.
7. There was a boy called Odd, and there was nothing strange or unusual about that, not in that time and place.
8. At dawn one still October day in the long ago of the world, across the hill of Alderley, a farmer from Moberley was riding to Macclesfield fair.
9. Rush hour. So many armpits, so little deodorant.
10. One dark season Grandible became certain that there was something living in his domain within the cheese tunnels.
11. Good day, brothers. I am ready talk to you now. Ready to tell you the truth.
12. When Mary Lennox was sent to Misselthwaite Manor to live with her uncle, everybody said she was the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen.
13. There was once a boy named Milo who didn’t know hwta to do with himself – not just sometimes but always.
14. This is the story of a bloodstained boy.
15. Polly cut off her hair in front of the mirror, feeling slightly guilty about not feeling very guilty about doing so.

Save