First Lines Friday: 7 August 2026

Happy Friday book lovers! We’re back with another First Lines Friday, a weekly feature for book lovers hosted by Wandering Words. What if instead of judging a book by its cover, its author or its prestige, we judged it by its opening lines? Here are the rules:

Pick a book off your shelf (it could be your current read or on your TBR) and open to the first page
Copy the first few lines, but don’t give anything else about the book away just yet – you need to hook the reader first
Finally… reveal the book!

First lines:

“Cannon fire before breakfast is obscene – and waking up to it is an atrocity.”

Do you recognize the book these first lines come from?

drumroll please!

A Prince Among Pirates by Katie Abdou

An instant New York Times and Indie bestseller!
A charming nobleman accidentally joins a pirate ship and falls for its debonair captain in this swashbuckling queer debut that’s perfect for fans of F.T. Lukens and Our Flag Means Death.

📖 SYNOPSIS

Kit Davenport is in trouble—not that this would surprise anyone who knows him. Headstrong, reckless, and utterly unsuited for the stodgy House of Lords, Kit has spent years dodging his father’s stern disapproval and delighting in clandestine rendezvous. But time is running out. With an arranged marriage looming and the confines of white wigs and stiff decorum closing in, Kit is desperate to escape a life that feels completely wrong for him.

His solution? A wildly impulsive decision that lands him aboard the Deliverance, a galleon captained by the infuriatingly charismatic Reggie Sharpe. With a devil-may-care attitude and a delicious grin, Captain Sharpe commands the waves with his crew of misfits…who all turn out to be pirates. Before Kit can say “wrong ship,” he’s trading ballroom etiquette for rum-soaked camaraderie, explosive gunfights, and, perhaps most excitingly, heart-stopping kisses under the stars.

But life at sea holds just as many secrets as treasures. And when Kit’s past catches up with him, he’ll have to decide who he truly wants to be: a gentleman or a pirate?