See if you can identify these opening lines from books that appear on many book club lists. Take it to your book club and put you heads together.

1. It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.

2. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

3. It was a Saturday afternoon on La Salle Street, years and years ago when I was a little kid, and around three o'clock Mrs. Shannon, the heavy Irish woman in her perpetually soup-stained dress, opened her back window and shouted out into the courtyard, "Hey, Cesar, yoo-hoo, I think you're on television, I swear it's you!"

4. In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels.

5. The two women were alone in the London flat. "The point is," said Anna, as her friend came back from the telephone on the landing, "the point is, that as far as I can see, everything's cracking up."

6. It was like so, but wasn't. I lost my thirty-fifth year. We got separated in the confusion of a foreign city where the language was strange and the authorities hostile. It was my own fault.

7. Riding up the winding road of Saint Agnes Cemetery in the back of the rattling old truck, Francis Phelan became aware that the dead, even more than the living, settled down in neighborhoods.

8. It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York.

9. He had to have planned it because when we drove onto the dock the boat was there and the engine was running and you could see the water churning up phosphorescence in the river, which was the only light there was because there was no moon, nor no electric light either in the shack where the dockmaster should have been sitting, nor on the boat itself, and certainly not from the car, yet everyone knew where everything was, and when the big Packard came down the ramp Mickey the driver braked it so that the wheels hardly rattled the boards, and when he pulled up alonside the gangway the doors were already open and they hustled Bo and the girl upside before they even made a shadow in all that darkness.

10. I first heard of Antonia on what seemed to me an interminable journey across the great midland plain of North America.

11. I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills.

12. They put the behemoths in the hold along with the rhinos, the hippos and the elephants. It was a sensible decision to use them as ballast; but you can imagine the stench.

Here are the answers:

1. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

2. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

3. Oscar Hijuelos, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love

4. Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

5. Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook

6. Richard Powers, Galatea 2.2

7. William Kennedy, Ironweed

8. Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

9. E.L. Doctorow, Billy Bathgate

10. Willa Cather, My Antonia

11. Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa

12. Julian Barnes, A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters