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Here are some one-sentence examples of (actual) successful pitches:

• A Nazi Kommandant of a concentration camp  forces one of the Jewish inmates to be his mistress; in part one, he tells his version of what happened; in part two, she tells her side of the story.
   

• After being convicted of helping her terminally ill mother-in-law commit suicide and being put on trial for murder, the protagonist, Claudia, begins to suspect that her husband may have helped his own mother kill herself.
   

• We all have skeletons in our closets, but what happens when those skeletons come out — as they have for Nema McNair?
   

• Just when Amelia's children are all grown and on their own, and she's anticipating how exciting married life will be again with her husband, Ken, everything that could upset her plans, happens.
   

• Two brothers and their female cousin decide to track down a serial killer themselves, not realizing that one of them may be the very killer they seek.
  
   

• Just at Isaac was unwillingly bound by his father Abraham to prove Abraham's faith in God, so are the children of Holocaust survivors unwittingly and unwillingly bound to each other because of their parents' experiences in the Nazi concentration camps during World War II.
   

• After losing a spouse to death, how many of us can look at the ordinary objects of our lives, re-evaluating them in terms of the lost spouse, and learn to grieve, release the grieving, and happily embrace life again?

Your one-sentence pitch doesn't necessarily have to be extremely short, although it shouldn't be hundreds of words long either. You can use semi-colons and subordinating conjunctions to help you out with your pitch, but it still has to be one sentence that's intriguing and attention-grabbing without giving away the end of the book.  (If the reader knows how everything is going to turn out, why would he want to read it?)

If you don't understand the concept of "urgency," or "hook," or "attention-grabbing," read Sherri Szeman's article from The Writer (reprinted in The Writer's Handbook 1997) about how to get urgency into your work: "Urgency: Good Writing Needs It."

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