“On a mountain above the clouds once lived a man who had been the gardener of the Emperor of Japan. Not many people would have known of him before the war, but I did. He had left his home on the rim of the sunrise to come to the central highlands of Malaya. I was seventeen years old when my sister first told me about him. A decade would pass before I travelled up to the mountains to see him.”
‘The Garden of Evening Mists’ by Tan Twan Eng
Amazon

Read my review of The Garden of Evening Mists.

Try one of these 1st paras & discover a new author:-
‘Armadillo’ by William Boyd
‘To Have and Have Not’ by Ernest Hemingway
‘Super-Cannes’ by JG Ballard

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
THE GARDEN OF EVENING MISTS by Tan Twan Eng #books via @SandraDanby http://wp.me/p5gEM4-2AL