: As obvious as it may sound, the one essential thing your opening must do is provide an entry point into your book. You want to bring your reader into your story as directly and as effectively

@Moriarity138

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As obvious as it may sound, the one essential thing your opening must do is provide an entry point into your book. You want to bring your reader into your story as directly and as effectively as possible. How you do that depends on your target audience, your specific book, and the distance between them.
The best opening I know is Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God. It's a lot longer than a sentence, but it's doing a ton of work.

Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the same horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men. Now, women forget all those things they don't want to remember, and remember everything they don't want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.
So the beginning of this was a woman and she had come back from burying the dead. Not the dead of sick and ailing with friends at the pillow and the feet. She had come back from the sodden and the bloated; the sudden dead, their eyes flung wide open in judgment.

This is a book about a poor, rural black woman, written at a time when one had never been the protagonist of a book like this before. Hurston couldn't jump right into the action without losing her mainstream audience immediately. So she starts out with one of those nice, classic European, statement of general principle openings, and exploits the fact that you're going to read "every man" as "everyone" (but only envision "every white man") because it's America in the 1930s. But right in the middle of the first paragraph, she switches it on you, and suddenly you're reading about women, whether you wanted to or not. It's seemingly another statement of general principle, but it contrasts with the first, and while you're still mulling that over, she hits you with the story, and you're hooked. You're going to keep on reading, even though you're going to be reading about people you (white male, 1930's American mainstream reader) have never even thought about before, and even though, before long, you're going to be wading waist deep in rural black dialect, because she's not only given you a killer story hook, she's also promised you this is going to also be a universal narrative, relevant even to you and your life.

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