Literary agents are busy people. Most of the good ones receive thousands of queries a year, so it's understandable when they don't have the time for reading a full manuscript, even when they like what they're reading in a synopsis or query.

Our 'First 50' series is a forum for exploration and discussion of how successful published novelists begin their novels. In this weekly posting, we'll be breaking down what happens--exactly--in these key opening pages of notable bestsellers and exploring how each writer goes about the all-important task of cultivating immediate reader engagement. Bestsellers--despite their flaws--are adept at compelling readers to read past the first chapter.

Special Topics in Calamity Physics, by Marisha Pessl

First sentence: “Before I tell you about Hannah Schneider’s death, I’ll tell you about my mother’s.”

Chapter one begins on page 15 and titled, “Othello.”

Two days before buying her new Volvo, Natasha Alicia Bridges van Meer, the narrator’s mother, plowed her Plymouth Horizon, ironically nicknamed Certain Death, into a stand of trees. She was killed instantly. Read more .
 

Veil of Roses, by Laura Fitzgerald

First sentence: “As I walk past the playground on my way to downtown Tucson, I overhear two girls teasing a third: Jake and Ella sitting in a tree. K-I-S-S-I-N-G. First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes a baby in a baby carriage!”

This is the second book I’ve reviewed in the past month that’s written in first person! What’s going on?!

The narrator remarks that this public teasing by nine-year-old girls would never happen in Iran: “They do not draw attention to themselves; they do not go to school with boys. They do not swing their long red hair and expect with Ella’s certainty that romantic love is in their future” (1). Read more .
 

God Is a Bullet, by Boston Teran

First sentence: “It is 7:23 on a Sunday morning when the Sheriff’s Department in Clay, California, gets the call a woman has been murdered.”

Present tense? Ambitious.

Chapter one is named “The Pearl, Fall 1970.”

The call comes from a boy in a phone box by the entrance to the freeway. The police speed through Barstow and through the ghost town of Calico—countryside known for Charles Manson, “Helter Skelter”, and Sunset Boulevard witchcraft. The police find the wispy 12-year-old who points them up Paradise Springs Road. Read More.
 

Until I Find You, by John Irving

First Sentence: “According to his mother, Jack Burns was an actor before he was an actor, but Jack’s most vivid memories of childhood were those moments when he felt compelled to hold his mother’s hand.”

This is a whopping-long novel at 820 pages, which seems to justify its five sections and thirty-nine chapters—something only a bestseller could get away with. Regardless, the first section is “The North Sea,” and the first chapter is ‘In the Care of Churchgoers and Old Girls.” Read More.
 

Skinny Dip, Carl Hiaasen

The Godfather, Mario Puzo

 
The first six pages serve as an introduction to the setting and character. The narration is in first person and begins with a melancholy meditation on Charleston, South Carolina. The still unnamed narrator ponders his connection to Edgar Allen Poe, another “son by visitation” of Charleston, not by birth. Another visitor to Charleston who Will McLean (named in the middle of page 2) identifies with is Osceola, a Seminole Indian chieftain. Read More.

Gone, But Not Forgotten, Phillip Margolin

This legal thriller starts out in the most appropriate (and cliché?) setting for its genre: the courtroom. The omniscient narrator introduces Betsy Tannenbaum, Andrea Hammermill’s defense attorney, in the murder of her client’s husband. It is quickly explained at the top of page 4 that Andrea did indeed pull the trigger (until there were no more bullets), but her pitiful sobbing makes it doubtful that this matronly woman is guilty of anything. And this is what the jury supports in their verdict.
Read More.

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Dave Eggers

The novel/memoir begins with the narrator putting his pants back on and returning to his mother, who is sitting on the couch. He says he was cutting his hair, he lies about cleaning up the cuttings, but his mother can’t check because she can’t move from the couch. Read More.

Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand

The question is posed by a nameless bum, yellow glints from the “metal yellow of the sky” reflect in his eyes. He is addressing Eddie Willers, who acts cagey and tense. Despite the familiarity assumed in the first question, the bum had merely asked Eddie for a dime for coffee. Eddie gives him the dime and walks on. He wonders about the uneasiness he always feels this time of day, and how the bum seemed to tap into it and understand this sense of dread. We have no idea who John Galt is, or why his name makes Eddie so uncomfortable. Read More.

 Down Will Come Baby, Gloria Murphy

Page 1 begins with the prologue. Robin has made her bed and is waiting for everyone to make a circle to introduce themselves. She is at Camp Raintree for the fifth year (since she was 8, making her 12 or 13 now) and has hated it every year. Read More.

Where I'm Bound, Allen Ballard

From the first sentence the reader can tell 1) Joe is probably white or a surprised repressed black 2) that black soldiers are uncommon, probably setting the time period way before the civil rights movement (if the “Yankee” reference didn’t throw you into the Civil War already), and 3) a war-time setting. Read More.

Seeker, Jack McDevitt

How’s that for an opening sentence? This novel starts out with a prologue under the subtitle “1398, Rimway Calendar,” which may or may not be a date. Wescott, Margaret, and his daughter Delia are trapped with “the others” beneath tons of ice and snow that had avalanched over the ski chalet. He flashes back to meeting Margaret, presumably his wife, years ago aboard the Falcon. Read More.

 

Bleeding Hearts, Ian Rankin

I love how breezy and jaded this first line is.

The narrator is drinking at a bar with another “businessman,” although our man is a hit man. “Bleeding hearts,” says the man at the bar on page 3, “are for the operating table, not for business,” and the two men cheers and drink. Read More.

 
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, Mark Haddon

It’s immediately clear that this is not our average narrator. The sentences are short, direct, and simple. Observations are described sort of backwards: “It looked as if [the dog] was running on its side, the ways dogs run when they think they are chasing a cat in a dream. But the dog was not running or asleep. The dog was dead.” The narrator is completely detached as he describes the poodle lying run through with a garden fork. Read More.