 | Affinity (A Virago V) by Sarah Waters
Buy new: £5.99 / Used from: £0.15 The first Sarah Waters I ever read; and I still have a tremendous soft spot for it
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 | Tipping the Velvet (Virago V) by Sarah Waters
Buy new: £5.59 / Used from: £2.98 ...and the second. Don't bother with the BBC adaption; there's so much more in the book
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 | Fingersmith by Sarah Waters
Buy new: £5.99 / Used from: £0.01 Not just because she's a woman, and not just because she's Welsh. Tokenism be damned; this is a bloody good read, with a twist you will not see coming
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 | Junky (Essential Penguin) by William S. Burroughs
Buy new: £3.69 / Used from: £1.67 My first Burroughs (at 11; oh, I had no business reading it at that age) and still powerful and deceptively accessible; always unglamorous and brutally honest
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 | The Annotated Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Buy new: £8.44 / Used from: £5.72 One of those books you think you've read even if you haven't. The annotated edition is a must; so dense with allusion and reference that you're bound to miss something without.
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 | 1985 by Anthony Burgess
Buy used from: £3.90 Is it Burgess' best book? Perhaps. Is it better than 1984? Could be...Is it criminally overlooked and crying out for a better edition? Definitely.
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 | Killer on the Road by James Ellroy
Buy used from: £0.33 Ignore the awful title, and be aware that this is only minor-league Ellroy...but Ellroy doing Jim Thompson is still a mark above most writers' best
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 | The Cold Six Thousand by James Ellroy
Buy new: £6.99 / Used from: £0.06 Finally Ellroy finds a wider canvas than LA. From Texas, to Vegas, to Cuba, to Vietnam, bad bad men doing bad bad things; brutal and harsh, tender and redemptive at once
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