 | A Confederacy of Dunces (Essential Penguin) by John Kennedy Toole
Buy new: £5.73 / Used from: £1.98 Every book should have a misanthropic, overweight anti-hero. But no book will ever have a better one.
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 | The Good Soldier Svejk and His Fortunes in the World War (Penguin Modern Classics) by Jaroslav Hasek
Buy used from: £4.17 Hilarious. Worth it just for the anecdotes about Hasek in the intro.
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 | Watt by Samuel Beckett
Buy used from: £4.79 Surreal; bemusing; sentences that never seem to end. My favourite Beckett book.
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 | Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges
Buy used from: £12.93 Short stories about time, reality and everything. Borges fits whole universes into a few pages.
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 | The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
Buy new: £5.96 / Used from: £2.39 Anarchic Russian surrealism from the thirties. Once censored but now released with a picture of the talking cat on its cover.
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 | His Dark Materials Gift Set: "Northern Lights", "The Subtle Knife", "The Amber Spyglass" by Philip Pullman
Buy used from: £6.50 Adult writers take note: stop name-checking txt msgng and Big Brother and you might come up with a novel as moving and intelligent as this one.
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 | Love Is a Dog from Hell by Charles Bukowski
Buy new: £6.97 / Used from: £5.44 Brilliant writer. If I could get away with stealing the line ''eyes like a child's crayon drawing'' then I would do it in a second.
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 | Crime and Punishment (Penguin Classics) by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Buy new: £5.01 / Used from: £0.75 I thought this was going to be dull. It wasn't.
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 | The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer by Neal Stephenson
Buy new: £5.96 / Used from: £0.39 My favourite book by a brilliant writer.
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 | From Hell by Alan Moore
Buy new: £14.91 / Used from: £11.99 A comic!
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 | The Plague (Penguin Modern Classics) by Albert Camus
Buy new: £5.74 / Used from: £3.00 The inspiration behind the awesome Dustin Hoffman movie Outbreak.
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 | A Series of Unfortunate Events: "The Bad Beginning", "The Reptile Room", "The Wide Window", "The Miserable Mill" by Lemony Snicket
Buy used from: £2.01 Children's books are great, especially when they're as dark and funny as this.
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 | The Twits by Roald Dahl
Buy used from: £0.01 Two horrible people being horrible to each other.
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 | The Maltese Falcon, The Thin Man, Red Harvest by Dashiel Hammett
Buy new: £10.90 / Used from: £9.90 Hard boiled.
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 | The Princess Bride by William Goldman
Buy new: £5.96 / Used from: £0.13 A rip-roaring adventure.
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 | The Lady in the Lake: And Other Novels (Penguin Modern Classics) by Raymond Chandler
Buy new: £9.74 / Used from: £7.42 More hard boiled action.
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 | The Adventures of Tintin Volume 5: Land of Black Gold / Destination Moon / Explorers on the Moon by Herge
Buy used from: £5.00 Tintin goes to the moon. Snowy gets a spacesuit.
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