Anyone who liked No Longer at Ease should check out M.G. Vassanji's The In-Between World of Vikram Lall. It's set in Kenya and Tanzania, and documents a fairly similar descent into corruption of a government worker who starts out as a youthful idealist wanting to improve his country.

I was torn between Middlemarch and Silas Marner, but opted for Silas as it's shorter and simpler, which I think is always the best place to start until you've decided whether you like the author.

George Eliot is one of my favourite authors. Something to keep in mind as you read her work: Eliot lived a very unconventional life (she lived common-law with a married man for many years). So she is concerned with the hypocrisies of "respectable society," which tries to sweep its dirty deeds under the carpet. You can see this in Silas Marner, in the treatment of Eppie's mother.

Also, GE was a rather mannish-looking woman with a formidable intellect, and was frequently regarded as being a little too "masculine" in terms of her intellectual interests. She was interested in Darwin's theory of evolution, and seems to have taken a lot of interest in whether men's and women's characters are formed as the result of nature, or nurture, and whether they can be altered. So we see Silas Marner, a bachelor, nurturing his small adopted daughter, and in Middlemarch we see Dorothea Brooke come to the gradual realization that she is her husband's intellectual superior, when all she wanted to be was his handmaiden.

Start with The House of the Spirits. The others are good, but this one is the best.

Start with The Book of Secrets, or the The In-Between World of Vikram Lall, both of which won Vassanji Canada's Giller Prize.

No New Land is also very good, and quite short.

I highly recommend Palace Walk, the first book in the Cairo trilogy (the other two are Palace of Desire and Sugar Street).

A Christmas Carol is a great place to start. It's short, and if you don't like it, then you know you probably don't like Dickens.

If you're a bit more ambitious, start with Great Expectations. It is in many ways atypical of Dickens' usual style, as other commenters have noted, but I liked it for that. Pip is a much more interesting protagonist that boring David Copperfield or angelic Oliver Twist. He's a deeply flawed person who comes to understand and overcome his flaws by the end of the book. With David and Oliver, there's really no character development. And the secondary characters in Great Expectations are very enjoyable too.

I loved David Copperfield, but it is a bit of a slog. Also, David himself is rather a dull character; it's the secondary characters that really make this book. A weakness of the book, in my opinion, is its over-reliance on coincidences.

Whatever you do, don't start with Bleak House. The female character is such a grateful little orphan that she turns my stomach.