Opening Lines

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813)

“We were in study hall when the headmaster entered, followed by a new boy not yet in school uniform and by the handyman carrying a large desk.” Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary (1857)

“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1877)

“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.” Franz Kafka, Metamorphosis and Other Stories (1915)

“My grandmother’s life and her death, in 1958, made a vivid impression on me. She came, as the stories and anecdotes about her say, suddenly out of the horizon, like a camel, with nothing except some baggage and three boys in tow.” K.S. Maniam, The Return (1981)

“I was born in Ceylon in 1916, at a time when spirits walked the earth just like people, before the glare of electricity and the roar of civilization had frightened them away into the concealed hearts of forests.” Rani Manicka, The Rice Mother (2002)