Guess the Book from the First Two Lines

Let’s shake off the cold and challenge your bookworm brain. Can you guess the title of the book and/or the author of these twenty books, from the first two lines?

Prologues are not included, we started from page one, chapter one. In a few cases, the author is an artist who uses few words, so there are three lines to guess from.

These lines have made writers immortal, their books famous. No cheating-these are all well-known works. They come from many different genres, so eclectic readers will have a good head start here, and we tried to mix it up about half and half with male and female authors.

Ready to start?



3. There’s a guy like me in every state and federal prison in America, I guess-I’m the guy who can get it for you. Tailor-made cigarettes, a bag of reefer if you’re partial to that, a bottle of brandy to celebrate your son or daughter’s high-school graduation, or almost anything else . . . within reason, that is.


5. In the week before their departure to Arrakis, when all the final scurrying about had reached a nearly unbearable frenzy, an old crone came to visit the mother of the boy, Paul. It was a warm night at Castle Caladan, and the ancient pile of stone that had served the Atreides family as home for twenty-six generations bore that cooled sweat feeling it acquired before a change in the weather.

6. The family of Dashwood had been long settled in Sussex. Their estate was large, and their property, where for many generations they had lived in so respectable a manner as to engage the general good opinion of their surrounding acquaintances.

7. Not for the first time, an argument had broken out over breakfast at number four, Privet Drive. Mr. Vernon Dursley had been woken in the early hours of the morning by a loud, hooting noise from his nephew Harry’s room.


9. It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they executed the Rosenburgs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York. I’m stupid about executions.


11. It happened every year, was almost a ritual. And this was his eighty-second birthday

12. On those cloudy days, Robert Neville was never sure when sunset came, and sometimes they were in the streets before he could get back. If he had been more analytical, he might have calculated the approximate time of their arrival; but he still used the lifetime habit of judging nightfall by the sky, and on cloudy days that method didn’t work.

13. Muse, tell me of the man of many wiles, the man who wandered many paths of exile after he sacked Troy’s sacred citadel. He saw the cities-mapped the minds-of many; and on the sea, his spirit suffered every adversity-to keep his life intact; to bring his comrades back.


15. The Island of Gont, a single mountain that lifts its peak a mile above the storm-racked Northeast Sea, is a land famous for wizards. From the towns in its high valleys and the ports on its dark narrow bays many a Gontishman has gone forth to serve the Lords of the Archipelago in their cities as wizard or mage, or, looking for adventure, to wander working magic from isle to isle in all of Earthsea.

16. In the corner of a first-class smoking carriage, Mr. Justice Wargrave, lately retired from the bench, puffed at a cigar and ran an interested eye through the political news in the Times. He laid the paper down and glanced out of the window.

17. When Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton. Bilbo was very rich and very peculiar, and had been the wonder of the Shire for sixty years, ever since his remarkable disappearance and unexpected return.


19. When I stepped out into the bright sunlight from the darkness of the movie house, I had only two things on my mind: Paul Newman and a ride home. I was wishing I looked like Paul Newman-he looks tough and I don’t-but I guess my own looks aren’t so bad.




1. A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens

2. 1984, George Orwell

3. Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, Stephen King

4. Beloved, Toni Morrison

5. Dune, Frank Herbert

6. Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen

7. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, JK Rowling

8. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

9. The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath

10. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte

11. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larson

12. I Am Legend, Richard Matheson

13. The Odyssey, Homer

14. The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood

15. A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin

16. And Then There Were None (also published as Ten Little Indians), Agatha Christie

17. The Fellowship of the Ring, JRR Tolkien

18. Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut

19. The Outsiders, SE Hinton

20. Matilda, Roald Dahl

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