It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a holidaymaker in possession of a plane ticket, must be in want of a book.

With apologies to Jane Austen, who said it much better.

As all trainee journalists are taught, the opening paragraph, or intro, is the most important in any article. Get the intro right and the rest of the article flows. Get it wrong and you get into all sorts of problems.

It’s the same with books. Some intros, indeed some opening sentences, demand that you read further. Others persuade you to close the book and your eyes, stretch out and dream the day away.

As the holiday season has begun, I thought this week I would look at some opening sentences in the hope of finding a book that you or your children would like.

Sometimes it’s obvious what kind of book follows as in: “But if he thought the woman was being murdered -.” As you would expect, Dorothy L Sayers fills Unnatural Death with all the suspects and amateur detecting you could want.

But what could come after “When a day you happen to know is Wednesday starts off by sounding like Sunday, there is something seriously wrong somewhere”?

The narrator is absolutely right about the wrongness: welcome to The Day of the Triffids, courtesy of John Wyndham.

And why does Ursula Le Guin want the reader to “Imagine darkness” which is the entire opening paragraph of A City of Illusions? It’s all the main character can see at the start of her novel about his struggle to learn who he is, where he is and where he belongs.

York Press:

Universal truth: a holidaymaker must be in search of a good book...

Maybe you want a fortnight-long book. An enormous sentence with 120 words between “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times......” and the full stop suggests a suitably weighty tome follows.

Indeed A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens takes a long time to read.

In contrast, Herman Melville takes just three words to grab the reader with “Call Me Ishmael” at the start of another solid read: Moby Dick.

Another misleading sentence is: “We came on the wind of the carnival”. Joanne Harris doesn’t take us to Brazil but to rural France and the delicious temptation of Chocolat.

You could argue that this sentence started the 20th century fantasy genre of novel: “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit”. JRR Tolkien spent a page and a half describing the hole before remembering no-one else then knew what The Hobbit was.

However, when JM Barrie turned his very successful West End play into a book that started “All children, save one, grow up” everyone knew he was writing about Peter Pan.

Talking about characters, try this one. “There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.” CS Lewis gives a lively pen portrait of the unfortunate lad before despatching him, much against his will, on The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

It is no accident that the last three are all books nominally for children. Adults will tolerate bad writing, children won’t; so if a children’s book has a poor opening paragraph, it won’t be read.

The next sentence had both adults and youngsters forming huge queues outside bookshops whenever a sequel was published.

“Mr and Mrs Dursley, of Number Four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.”

The book is of course, not about the Dursleys, whom JK Rowling banishes from the plot for being perfectly normal in chapter six and three quarters, but about Harry Potter (and the Philosopher’s Stone).

Finally, a question. Would you want to read the book that starts “One of the luckiest accidents in my wife’s life is that she happened to marry a man who was born on the 26th of September”?

No, I’m not going to tell you its name. But I will give you two clues. It’s been turned into a film (under a different title) and its author has already featured in this article.

Happy reading / bon voyage.