 | The Gormenghast Trilogy by Mervyn Peake
Buy new: £9.99 / Used from: £3.44 Ignore the valiant but totally inadequate television series. Comparing it with the books is like comparing Prawn cocktail flavour crisps with a sumptuous dish of Beluga Caviar.
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 | The Lord of the Rings (3 Book Box set) by J.R.R. Tolkien
Buy new: £11.97 / Used from: £11.99 Not much point writing anything about this, except, that as brilliant as the films are&well, see my Prawn cocktail crisps comment above.
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 | Sailor Song by Ken Kesey
Buy used from: £0.01 Ken Kesey at his most inventive best.
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 | The Old Man and the Sea (Vintage Classics) by Ernest Hemingway
Buy new: £4.13 / Used from: £1.19 Man versus nature in this classically macho proving rite.
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 | The Dirk Gently Omnibus by Douglas Adams
Buy new: £12.29 / Used from: £0.47 These books had all the savvy wit and cynical truisms of the Hitch-hiker series.
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 | The House of the Dead (Classics) by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Buy new: £5.65 / Used from: £0.01 A book that is brutal, shocking, thrilling, claustrophobic and above all an examination of humanity. Not as gritty a read as Ive made it sound, I recommend heartily as a tremendous work.
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 | Mr Pye by Mervyn Peake
Buy new: £5.99 / Used from: £2.99 A book of genius. I thought it was a brilliantly conceived idea on the nature of good and evil in man. Like Dostoyevskys The Idiot, the message is that truly good men are not meant for this world.
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 | The Space Merchants (S.F. Masterworks) by Frederik Pohl
Buy new: £4.49 / Used from: £1.43 Ive always enjoyed books by sci-fi master Frederick Pohl and this jointly written offering was no exception.
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 | James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
Buy used from: £0.01 How could I not include a book by my childhood master?
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 | Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos by H.P. Lovecraft
Buy new: £8.19 / Used from: £5.14 By turns slightly ridiculous and brilliantly written, the dark references to unseen horrors predate the Blair Witch Project by decades.
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 | The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever: "Lord Foul's Bane", "Illearth War" and "Power That Preserves" by Stephen Donaldson
Buy new: £10.89 / Used from: £1.38 An amazing work that gripped me so totally that I read through all six books in a matter of weeks!
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 | I Am Legend (S.F. Masterworks) by Richard Matheson
Buy new: £4.49 / Used from: £0.30 Was the inspiration for Night of the Living Dead film or something, but the book was a million times better, blah, blah, etc,&
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 | Don Quixote (Penguin Classics) by Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra
Buy used from: £2.70 A massive, moving, classic tale of romantic delusion and harsh reality.
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 | The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (Penguin Popular Classics) by Anne Bronte
Buy new: £2.25 / Used from: £0.01 This and Agnes Grey show Anne as a quite brilliant writer in her own right.
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 | Erewhon (Dover Thrift) by Samuel Butler
Buy used from: £0.58 OK, Maybe not genius exactly, but some very pithy ideas on society.
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 | One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
Buy used from: £0.01 Ken Kesey has written just a few novels, one read of this and it'll seem like a crime.
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