“It was a Saturday night when the man with the red waistcoat arrived in London. It was, to be precise, six of the clock on the fifteenth of April in the year of 1837 that those hooded eyes looked out the window of the Dover coach and beheld, in the bright aura of gas light, a golden bull and an overgrown mouth opening to devour him – the sign of his inn, the Golden Ox.”
‘Jack Maggs’ by Peter Carey 
Amazon

Try one of these 1st paras & discover a new author:-
‘Sea Glass’ by Anita Shreve 
‘Such a Long Journey’ by Rohinton Mistry 
‘Jane Eyre’ by Charlotte Bronte 

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
JACK MAGGS by Peter Carey #amwriting http://wp.me/p5gEM4-1GN via @SandraDanby