You Have Five Pages, The Berlin Exchange by Joseph Kanon, to Tell Me You're Good.

The first chapter can make or break a reader's engagement with a story. We as writers must craft brilliant opening pages in order to hook those picky readers, so let's study the stories of others to see how they do it! The first pages of The Berlin Exchange by Joseph Kanon bring readers to the 1960s and the height of the Cold War. We are to witness a prisoner exchange...only we are quickly transported back in time to before that exchange with the briefest allusions of what has brought one of the prisoners to that moment of exchange. Despite Kanon's writing choices not following my preference for sensory detail and action in the first paragraph, I cannot help but be intrigued with both our narrator and enigmatic protagonist, Martin. What will you, fellow creatives, make of these first five pages? Let's find out!