 | The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Buy new: £8.75 / Used from: £9.99 One of the most haunting and absorbing novels I have read in years. Nuclear winter seen through the eyes of Samuel Beckett.
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 | Cat's Cradle (Essential Penguin) by Kurt Vonnegut
Buy new: £3.56 / Used from: £3.74 Vonnegut's best novel? Laughter in the dark: bracing, chilling, and without a single bum note.
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 | Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban
Buy new: £2.26 / Used from: £2.00 Hoban's masterpiece: a novel that burrows into you and never lets you go. A post-apocalypse Huck Finn, where style and content are indivisible. In my view, the most important novel on this list.
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 | The Time Machine (Penguin Classics) by H.G. Wells
Buy new: £1.70 / Used from: £0.01 A classic 'glimpse into the future'. Eloi, Morlocks, giant crabs at the end of time: who could ask for more?
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 | The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham
Buy used from: £0.30 Blindness by asteroid, death by giant vegetable. Not the plot of a '50s monster movie but the premise of one of the most startling and influential novels in British sci-fi.
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 | The Drowned World by J.G. Ballard
Buy new: £2.95 / Used from: £2.45 Global warming? Rising sea levels? Mankind retreating to the poles? Tch! Who could make up such a fantasy?
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 | The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells
Buy new: £1.07 / Used from: £0.99 Wells again. Aliens destroy Woking on their path to world domination. We all have to start somewhere.
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 | The Crystal World (Flamingo Modern Classic) by J.G. Ballard
Buy new: £2.87 / Used from: £0.99 And Ballard again. He doesn't really care about the world succumbing to crystallization: it's just an excuse for some damn fine writing, characters with manly surnames, and lots of metaphysics.
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 | Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
Buy new: £5.59 / Used from: £0.01 Okay, so the central story owes a debt to Riddley Walker that it can't quite pay off. But 'An Orison for Somni' is remarkable. David Mitchell is a wonderful novelist: a fount of stories.
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 | Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning by George Monbiot
Buy used from: £4.98 Oh damn: this one's for real.
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Listmania!
