First Lines: Frank Herbert

A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct.

Dune

Frank Herbert

First Lines: Barbara Hodgson

Helen woke up in the middle of the night wearing someone else's breasts. Not her own insignificant, almost nonexistent bumps, but huge pendulous, full ones.

The Sensualist

Barbara Hodgson

First Lines:: Ernest Hemingway

Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton. Do not think that I am very much impressed by that as a boxing title, but it meant a lot to Cohn.

The Sun Also Rises

Ernest Hemingway

First Lines: Alice Hoffman

Once a year there was a knock at the door.

The Story Sisters

Alice Hoffman

First Lines: Hilary Thayer Hamann

Kate turned to check the darkening clouds and the white arc of her throat looked long like the neck of a preening swan.

Anthropology of an American Girl

Hilary Thayer Hamann

First Lines: Dara Horn

Inside a barrel in the bottom of a boat, with a canteen of water wedged between his legs and a packet of poison concealed in his pocket, Jacob Rappaport felt a knot tightening in his stomach—not because he was doing something dangerous, but because he was about to do something wrong.

All Other Nights

Dara Horn

First Lines: Ernest Hemingway

In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains.

A Farewell to Arms

Ernest Hemingway

First Lines: Victor Hugo

Three hundred and forty eight years, six months, and nineteen days ago today, the Parisians awoke to the sound of all the bells in the triple circuit of the city, the university, and the town ringing a full peal. 

The Hunchback of Notre Dame

Victor Hugo

First Lines: Jim Harrison

It used to be Cliff and Vivian and now it isn’t.

The English Major

Jim Harrison

First Lines: Alice Hoffman

You would think it would be impossible to find anything new in the world, creatures no man has ever seen before, one-of-a-kind oddities in which nature has taken a backseat to the coursing pulse of the fantastical and the marvelous.

The Museum of Extraordinary Things

Alice Hoffman

First Lines: Ernest Hemingway

It was now lunchtime and they were all sitting under the double green fly of the dining-tent pretending that nothing had happened.

The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber

Ernest Hemingway

First Lines: Khaled Hosseini

Mariam was five years old the first time she heard the word harami.

A Thousand Splendid Suns

Khaled Hosseini

First Lines: Jennifer Haigh

Summer comes late to Massachusetts. The gray spring is frosty, unhurried: wet snow on the early plantings, a cold lesson for optimistic gardeners, for those who have not learned. Chimneys smoke until Memorial Day. Then, all at once, the ceiling lifts. The sun fires, scorching the muddy ground.

The Condition

Jennifer Haigh

First Lines: Nick Hornby

Can I explain why I wanted to jump off the top of a tower block?

A Long Way Down

Nick Hornby

First Lines: Dashiell Hammett

I first heard Personville called Poisonville by a red-haired mucker named Hickey Dewey in the Big Ship in Butte.

Red Harvest

Dashiell Hammett

First Lines: Anthony Horowitz

When the doorbell rings at three in the morning, it's never good news.

Stormbreaker

Anthony Horowitz

First Lines: Khaled Hosseini

I became what I am today at the age of twelve, on a frigid overcast day in the winter of 1975.

The Kite Runner

Khaled Hosseini

First Lines: Ernest Hemingway

The strange thing was, he said, how they screamed every night at midnight.

In Our Time

Ernest Hemingway

First Lines: Nathaniel Hawthorne

A throng of bearded men, in sad-colored garments and gray, steeple-crowned hats, intermixed with women, some wearing hoods, and others bareheaded, was assembled in front of a wooden edifice, the door of which was heavily timbered with oak, and studded with iron spikes.

The Scarlet Letter

Nathaniel Hawthorne

First Lines: Robert A. Heinlein

Once upon a time when the world was young there was a Martian named Smith.

Stranger in a Strange Land

Robert A. Heinlein