UKC

I mean starting to read one, not write one. Some novels start rather low key and build, but some start with a shocking event which grips you before you get to the foot of page one. “Enduring Love” by Ian McEwan starts with a terrifying misadventure with a hot air balloon; “The Fall” by Simon Mawer starts with the eponymous event. My current read, of which I’m only on about chapter 3 or 4, is “This must be the place” by Maggie O’Farrell which begins with a man standing outside his house watching some strangers, perhaps looking through binoculars or a camera in a nearby wood when his wife rushes out of the house with a shotgun (which the man seems not to know she possesses) and fires it, into the air. I was hooked instantly!

Any more good examples?

The opening sentence from "Lolita" is one of the finest in literature, subject manner not withstanding. 

I was instantly hooked by the opening, and first chapter, of Orwell's "1984"

‘It was the day my grandmother exploded’ Crow Road, Iain Banks. Got my attention anyway 

"A screaming comes across the sky." The opening sentence of one of my favourite novels by one of my favourite authors: Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon. It's violent drama is brilliantly enhanced by its memorable alliteration and its skilful rhythmic patterning. I'm a big fan.

Is The Crow Road by Iain Banks too obvious?

"It was the day my grandmother exploded. I sat in the crematorium, listening to my Uncle Hamish quietly snoring in harmony to Bach's Mass in B Minor, and I reflected that it always seemed to be death that drew me back to Gallanach."

Edit: Second mention in five replies, maybe it is too obvious.

Somebody aptly quoted the first paragraph of Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins in a recent pub thread about vegetables.  Nothing happens, but it still grabs your attention:

“The beet is the most intense of vegetables. The radish, admittedly, is more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent not of passion. Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity. Beets are deadly serious.”

Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses. Its inhabitant are, as the man once said, “whores, pimps, gambler and sons of bitches,” by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, “Saints and angels and martyrs and holymen” and he would have meant the same thing.

- Opening paragraph of Cannery Row by John Steinbeck

"It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me."  Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess

Ha ha, exactly what I was about to post!

I’d forgotten that one. I suddenly thought of Love in the Time of Cholera  - IIRC it starts with an old man picking fruit who falls and kills himself.

Some places are too evil to be allowed to exist. Some cities are too wicked to be suffered. Calcutta is such a place. Before Calcutta I would have laughed at such an idea. Before Calcutta I did not believe in evil—certainly not as a force separate from the actions of men. Before Calcutta I was a fool.

After the Romans had conquered the city of Carthage, they killed the men, sold the women and children into slavery, pulled down the great buildings, broke up the stones, burned the rubble, and salted the earth so that nothing would ever grow there again. That is not enough for Calcutta. Calcutta should be expunged.

Before Calcutta I took part in marches against nuclear weapons. Now I dream of nuclear mushroom clouds rising above a city. I see buildings melting into lakes of glass. I see paved streets flowing like rivers of lava and real rivers boiling away in great gouts of steam. I see human figures dancing like burning insects, like obscene praying mantises sputtering and bursting against a fiery red background of total destruction.

The city is Calcutta. The dreams are not unpleasant.

Some places are too evil to be allowed to exist.

Song of Kali - Dan Simmons

Blimey.  And people think John Betjeman was being hard on Slough!

"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." - William Gibson, Neuromancer

Call me Ishmael

The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.

Mind you, there's a hell of a lot of words to follow those...

Some first lines just beg one to read on. A good example is the simple opening sentence of Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier:

"This is the saddest story I have ever heard."

My first choice too.

My other would be:

"We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like "I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive..." and suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas and a voice was screaming "Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?"

my other quote from the same book "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas"

“We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers... and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls.
Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get locked into a serious drug collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can.”

"It was a dark and Stormy Night".  Snoopy's unfinished novel. 

A couple of science fiction contenders from me:

“Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.”

Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams

or

 “In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth.”

The Bible

Alan Warner’s ‘Morvern Callar’ is an interesting example. It’s not so much the first lines (which I can’t remember) as the first few pages. Starting like many crime novels with a dead body it quickly veers off in a shockingly different direction. Morvern’s behaviour after discovering the body of her boyfriend is startlingly amoral, and her flat, matter-of-fact, voice and tone compounds this. It either draws you in or turns you off. 

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times . . ."

Mainly because I found it so scary, not only the first time when I had to read it, but on subsequent occasions as well.

There is something about the guillotine that resonates with my imagination, in a way not shared by accounts of firing squads or beheadings at the Tower of London, etc.

Another favourite opening to another classic:

The first time I laid eyes on Terry Lennox he was drunk in a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith outside the terrace of The Dancers.

Raymond Chandler: The Long Goodbye

(Matched by a brilliant opening scene to the Altman movie based on it.)

One evening of late summer, before the nineteenth century had reached one-third of its span, a young man and woman, the latter carrying a child, were approaching the large village of Weydon-Priors, in Upper Wessex, on foot.

and

When Farmer Oak smiled, the corners of his mouth spread, till they were within an unimportant distance of his ears, his eyes were reduced to mere chinks, and diverging wrinkles appeared round them, extending upon his countenance like the rays in a rudimentary sketch of the rising sun

I haven't got the book to hand, A tale of two cities, but the whole paragraph is worth quoting. A list of opposites.

I also like the opening lines of The Cruel Sea...their only enemy is the sea, the cruel sea! Of course Nicholas Montserrat did actually sail in a destroyer in  WW2 so was writing from personal experience. I loved the film too.

I have to admit my ignorance. My guess would be Thomas Hardy for the first one.

I used to go out with a girl called Rebecca, who has been named after the Du Maurier book, so to appear keen I decided to read it. “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley...” and a load of stuff about a gravel path. I gave up after one page and the relationship didn’t last long either. 

You'd be right if you guessed that for both. As a Black Countryman I should point out that the custom of wife-selling reputedly continued into the early twentieth century here, the last recorded instance being at Bilston market.

'My mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know'.  Albert Camus, 'The Stranger'.

It's a pretty good start, actually:

He'd cut His throat with the knife.  He'd near chopped off His hand with the meat cleaver. He couldnt object so I lit a Silk Cut.  <sic>

That doesn't even rhyme! How about this instead:
I used to go out with a girl called Rebecca, who was named after the book by Du Maurier. So to appear keen, I gave it a read and ended up kissing her.

Ah yes- I remember! Thanks!

The alienation and anomie of the book in a sentence- brilliant. I think of Morvern Callar as a clear descendant.

Ian Banks in his i-less mode in the Wasp Factory: a brilliant job of establishing a weird psychological landscape in the first couple of paragraphs- 

“I HAD BEEN making the rounds of the Sacrifice Poles the day we heard my brother had escaped. I already knew something was going to happen; the Factory told me.

At the north end of the island, near the tumbled remains of the slip where the handle of the rusty winch still creaks in an easterly wind, I had two Poles on the far face of the last dune. One of the Poles held a rat head with two dragonflies, the other a seagull and two mice. I was just sticking one of the mouse heads back on when the birds went up into the evening air, kaw-calling and screaming, wheeling over the path through the dunes where it went near their nests. I made sure the head was secure, then clambered to the top of the dune to watch with my binoculars.”

"One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin."

I was reminded of this by a great cartoon in last week's Guardian. In the next panel the story continues...

"But due to the lockdown, nobody noticed"

This was the opening line of Edward Bulwer-Lytton's 1830 novel Paul Clifford, which is often regarded as an archetype of bad writing, and there is now an International Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest for bad writing. Henry Lytton, a direct descendant, defended Edward in a debate with the founder of this award, pointing out that Edward has given us such time-honoured phrases as "the pen is mightier than the sword", "the great unwashed", and "the almighty dollar". (This last bit of trivia from Wikipedia.)

The 100 year old man who climbed out of the window and disappeared.

Unfortunately it won't let me copy and paste.  

Nobody’s given any examples of novels that start low- key and build, as per Rog’s original post. I can’t really think of any at the moment- I suspect that if they do get really absorbing I quickly forget the slow start. 

Hardy often starts very low key. The first example above is reasonably typical: unnamed characters moving through the landscape on "an afternoon in November" "an evening in May" etc.

Proof that perhaps white men shouldn’t be allowed to write about the subcontinent. Some exceptions, obviously.

Also this thread has yet to mention 100 years; suggesting that you’re mostly heathens. Andy Clarke excepted, as he probably educated some heathen children and turned them into angels.

'Stately, plump, Buck Mulligan came from the stair-head, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.  A yellow dressing gown, un-girdled, was sustained gently behind him on the mild morning air.'

Ulysses.

Unspectacular, but perfect nonetheless.

Sadly, I had to spend more time on their exam grades than their immortal souls. Mind you, probably only a matter of time until religious conversions appear in the school performance tables.

You don’t think my example does that? 

The OP is actually rather badly (or at least confusingly) written, in this respect. It states that some novels start low-key and then build, but the bulk of the OP is about exciting and instantly compelling beginnings and I assumed that the request for “good examples” did not include low key starts. So I gave an example of a low key start 

Try starting a novel, getting to page 120 and discovering your copy is a misprint and the next 35 pages are missing.

Was enjoying this one as well. Typical!

this happened to me with Douglas Adams’ “Life, the Universe and Everything” but as leapt forward to a chapter that started with a line something like “Time travel is an unusual thing”, I assumed for years that it was deliberate 

I've never read Money Dick so I didn't really register it.

Money Dick? Is that the Ron Jeremy autobiography? 

Ha - autocorrected again! 

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Or, 

I am a sick man, I am a spiteful man, I am an unpleasant man - I think there is something wrong with my liver. 

“Call me Jonah. My parents did, or nearly did. They called me John.”

both Thomas Hardy -

The Mayor of Casterbridge and Far from the Madding Crowd.  They may be due for a re-read.

Interesting that a fair few of the responses don’t really fit the question. No matter, still fun. But quite a few give their favourite opening, which isn’t quite the same as the shocking opening. There don’t seem to be too many true shockers or instant grippers. For example, the Hardy openings are really quite restful.

What was the actual question? It wasn’t very clear from the OP. I didn’t know if you meant opening lines, a first page, or a longer beginning. 

What makes for an instant gripper? That’s the next question. It doesn’t have to be a shocker- it might be simply intriguing, puzzling, or stylistically brilliant. 

An example that occurs to me is the opening of Angela Carter’s ‘Love’ :

”“One day, Annabel saw the sun and moon in the sky at the same time. The sight filled her with a terror which entirely consumed her … for she had no instinct for self-preservation if she was confronted by ambiguities.” 

That intrigued me in the sense that I wanted to find out more about a character that could be terrified by such a thing

Far from the Madding Crowd turns very quickly from rural idyll to personal catastrophe for the farmer within a few pages, but I'd have to have posted more ..

I still find them striking openings which drew me to want to go in ...

going to science fiction I've never read anything that thrilled me more than at the age of 9 or 10 I read

"No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water."

long before the musical version with Richard Burton.  For someone of my age then this was mind blowing and addicitive stuff! I was drawing tripods and tentacles picking up people all over my schoolwork for months after that