Literary genius required. Apply below.

I promised to introduce some quizzes and here is one. Below are the first few sentence from six novels, all on my bookshelves. I supply dates of first publication and birth nationality of author. Answers will be provided by 25 April or by rapid e-mail to any who attempt answers via comments. Anyone who gets 4 correct would be worthy of an honorable mention, 5 or 6, without help, must make you very well read.

1. Sleeping, just before five, on a dark October's afternoon, he had a singularly vivid and audible dream. He dreamed that he was on a ship, which was bound upon some far, lovely, and momentous voyage, but which left the coast less than an hour ago (1929; English).

2. They threw me off the hay truck about noon. I had swung on the night before, down at the border, and as soon as I got up there under the canvas, I went to sleep. , I needed plenty of that, after three weeks in Tia Juana, and I was still getting it when they pulled off to one side to let the engine cool. Then they saw a foot sticking out and threw me off. (1934; American)

3. The sun is shining in the office of Heinrich Kroll and Funeral Monuments. It is April 1923, and business is good. (1956; German)

4. At sixty miles per hour, you could pass our farm in a minute, on County Road 686, which ran due north into the T intersection at Cabot Street Road. Cabot Street Road was really just another country blacktop, except that five miles west it ran into and out of the town of Cabot. (1991; American)

5. It was not until several weeks after he had decided to murder his wife that Dr Bickleigh took any active steps in the matter. (1931; English)

6. In Poland's deepest autumn, a tall young man in an expensive overcoat, double-breasted dinner jacket beneath it and – in the lapel of the dinner jacket – a large ornamental gold-on-black enamel swastika, emerged from a fashionable apartment block in Straszewskiego Street on the edge of the ancient centre of Cracow, and saw his chauffeur waiting with fuming breath by the open door of an enormous and, even in this blackened world, lustrous Adler limousine.

"Watch the pavement, Herr ________*," said the chauffeur, "It's icy like a widow's heart." (1982; Australian)

* Name suppressed.