I'd suggest The Pickwick Papers (Dickens's first novel) . It starts off a bit silly (Dickens was criticised at the time), but once it gets into its stride and Dickens develops Mr Pickwick's character it becomes a wonderfully entertaining picaresque - with its dark episodes (Dickens was all too familiar with the reality of imprisonment in a debtors' prison, for instance), his satirical, knowledgeable and (to me, at any rate!) fascinating depictions of legal practice in the 1830s - and Dickens is responsible for our romantic ideas about stagecoaches. Here they are, in their reality, not always romantic (he was writing, as a young man, at the end of the stagecoach era, and they never again get so much attention in his books). Anyway, I think you'll love it.
