Ovid's Fasti employs narrative hooks in the openings of each book, including a description of a bloody ghost and an ominous exchange between the characters Callisto and Diana.
[3] A narrative hook can also take the form of a short passage showing an important event in the life of one of the work's characters.
In Anna Quindlen's Black and Blue, the opening sentence recounts the first time the protagonist endured abuse from her husband, which is the core theme of the novel.
Toni Morrison's Beloved begins in medias res and transitions to a description of the house that serves as the novel's setting, disrupting the reader's expectations of a typical narrative structure.
In more elaborate form, a frame story can contain explicit statements ("This is the most inexplicable thing to happen to me") and explicit promises ("I would never have believed that such commonplace events would result such consequences"), and raise the question why the listeners wish to hear what is told, all of which promise more intriguing events ahead.
A thematic statement, as with the opening line of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice ("It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.