 | Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (International Writers) by Patrick Suskind
Buy new: £5.00 / Used from: £0.01 Bloody brilliant, you can smell him, hear the crowd, so incredibly well written and evocative but the only decent book by Patrick Suskind. Marvellous
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 | Vanity Fair (Penguin Popular Classics) by William Thackeray
Buy new: £2.00 / Used from: £0.01 So relevant to today's life, we have the same feelings and emotions - superb social commentary despite being set in the 19th century; we all know a Becky
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 | Crime and Punishment (Wordsworth Classics) by F.M. Dostoevsky
Buy new: £1.99 / Used from: £0.01 Amazing book, needs to be read once a year, excellent, a real must on anyone's book shelf
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 | The Famished Road by Ben Okri
Buy new: £5.59 / Used from: £0.01 A wonderful read....spirits in the trees.....magical, harsh, brutal at times, but uplifting
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 | Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
Buy new: £4.02 / Used from: £0.01 The first I'd recommend in a series of surreal/magical realism type books I've come to love - can anyone recommend more?! It is easy to read, and a great story
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 | The Wind-up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
Buy new: £6.26 / Used from: £1.65 My fave Murakami, - what a great find, a new and slightly weird and surreal author!! However, after having read all but the latest, he becomes repetitious - the same characters and ears in the plots
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 | One Hundred Years of Solitude (Essential Penguin) by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Buy used from: £0.01 Thank you to my Colombian Spanish teacher in London, what a great author, though seemingly lots of people find this hard going. Surreal/magically strange - great!
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 | Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Buy used from: £0.01 Wonderful! Considerably fewer characters than 100 Years...a beautiful and senstitive (non soppy!) love story
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 | Diary by Chuck Palahnuik
Buy used from: £15.15 Nicely weird. A woman keeps a diary for her husband who is in hospital, in a coma. She starts to unravel his behaviour before the accident, or was it an accident?
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 | Anna Karenina (Russian Language Edition) by L.N. Tolstoy
Buy used from: £109.45 Ok, finished with the surreal books. This is such a fantastic and well written book, a true classic, easy to read, real characters, sad, but still parallels today's busy life
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 | Regeneration by Pat Barker
Buy used from: £0.01 Don't be put off by the WW1 nature...and do read the other 2 books in the trilogy, really poignant and brilliantly crafted, a privilege to read
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 | The Alchemist: A Fable About Following Your Dream by Paulo Coelho
Buy new: £3.99 / Used from: £0.01 A real feel good book, similis and messages galore; if you like this, then also try Candide or Jonathan Livingstone Seagull or the first half of the Celestine Prophecy
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 | A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry
Buy used from: £0.70 Wow! A beautifully written book, full of compassion, sadness, humour, serendipity, incredible characters, quite an epic....a real saga. Try also The Impressionist by Hari Kunzru
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 | The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks
Buy new: £5.00 / Used from: £0.01 An excellent book; Iain Banks' first, and it shows. Truly imaginative, different, funny, shocking and completely the best he's ever written
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 | Blindness by Jose Saramago
Buy new: £5.96 / Used from: £1.20 This is bleak, stark, disturbing. About the breakdown of society and the awful things we do to each other. Think of any of the world's wars, and these are described here. But excellent and powerful
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 | The Way I Found Her by Rose Tremain
Buy new: £6.96 / Used from: £0.01 Recommend all of Rose Tremain. This is my favourite, about life seen through the eyes of a 13 yr old boy in Paris with his mother and their friend. But also do try Music & Silence and Restoration
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