Think back to the last time a book grabbed you from the very first sentence. That feeling (the one that says I have to keep reading) is no accident. A great opening line is a carefully set hook.
According to Collider‘s recent ranking of the ten best opening lines in book history, the greatest ever written belongs to a Russian novel published nearly 150 years ago. It comes from Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, and it goes like this:
“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
Fourteen words. And yet, as Collider put it, they do something remarkable. Beyond setting up the novel itself, that sentence more or less explains what makes any story worth reading: unhappiness.
What the Book Is Actually About
Anna Karenina tells two very different stories at once. In the first, Anna, a married aristocrat, leaves her cold husband for a military officer, choosing passion over the rigid rules of high society. In the second, a wealthy landowner named Konstantin searches for meaning through work, family, and faith.
The two plots together carry out the promise of that opening line. Happiness, Tolstoy suggests, requires a careful balance of many things working in harmony. But unhappiness? That can come from any direction, in any form, at any time.
For readers who lived through the complicated decades of the mid-20th century, the losses, the changes, the families that came together and sometimes fell apart, that idea still rings true.
The Dark Real-Life Story Behind It
Tolstoy did not arrive at this story from his imagination alone. In 1872, a woman named Anna Stepanovna Pirogova (a housekeeper for his neighbor) threw herself under a train after being scorned by her lover. Tolstoy personally observed the autopsy and, according to The New Republic, was deeply shaken by what he saw.
He began writing Anna Karenina the following year. Russia at the time was also experiencing a broader rise in suicides, and that cultural mood found its way into the novel. It took nearly four years to finish.
Tolstoy Almost Gave Up
Writing the book nearly broke him. “My God,” he wrote to a friend and literary critic named Nikolai Strakhov, “if only someone would finish A. Karenina for me! It’s unbearably repulsive.” In another letter to Strakhov, he added, “I’m disgusted with what I’ve written. I need to cross it all out and throw it away and disown it.”
He wrote to his friend, the poet Afanasy Fet, simply: “My work is not moving.”
Then something shifted. In one letter, he described the moment everything finally came together, how all the threads “became so well and truly tied up” that he finished the novel in draft form and felt genuinely pleased with it. Those promised weeks, of course, stretched into years before the book was done.
The first installments ran in The Russian Herald, the same journal that had published both War and Peace and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. When it was serialized from 1875 to 1877 and released as a complete book in 1878, it was an immediate sensation. Collider notes it functioned as the popular romance novel of its era.
A Story That Has Never Stopped Moving People
The novel went on to become one of the most celebrated works of literature ever written. It has inspired dozens of film and television adaptations, including Clarence Brown’s 1935 film starring Greta Garbo and Joe Wright’s 2012 adaptation starring Keira Knightley, which won an Oscar.
For the record, Stephen King’s The Gunslinger, which opens with “The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed”, came in at number five on Collider‘s list. A great line. Just not the greatest.
That honor still belongs to Tolstoy. After 150 years and roughly 330,000 words, his opening sentence remains the most celebrated 14 words in the book. In a single breath, he told readers exactly what kind of story they were stepping into and then spent hundreds of pages proving himself right.
