“Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge.”

With the first fifteen words of her novel The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood takes a vice-like grip on the reader.  She doesn’t let you go until the last page.  It is a powerful book, deeply emotive, and, for my money, has an opening line that rates right up there with Rebecca’s “last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.”  But what makes it so good?  Why does it press all the buttons needed for an effective opening?  And what can we do to evoke that sort of sympathy from the first page?

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