Which novel opens 'It was the best of times, it was the worst of times'?

A Tale of Two Cities, and the sentence keeps going for another hundred words in the same rhythm - a series of paired opposites ending in the observation that the period was so like the present that its noisiest authorities insisted on it being described in the superlative degree, for good or for evil. It is a joke about people who think their own era is uniquely extreme.

It is Dickens without the comedy, which is unusual for him, and it has sold on a scale that is hard to verify but is routinely given as among the best-selling novels ever written. It also has the least Dickensian ending: a sacrifice, and a closing line spoken by a man on his way to be executed, which schoolchildren have been made to memorise for a century and a half.

He was writing it while his own life came apart. He had separated from his wife of twenty-two years after meeting an actress eighteen, published a public statement about the marriage in his own magazine, and fallen out with his publishers over it. The novel's preoccupation with second chances and being reborn into a different life is not usually read as coincidental.