 | Anna Karenina (Oprah #5): Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition (Oprah's Classics Book Club Selections) by Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy
Buy used from: £2.77 Forget that fickle, emotionally frigid, cuckolding witch Anna, and read this instead for the beautiful courtship of Kitty and Levin. This Pevear/Volokhonsky translation is sublime.
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 | Fahrenheit 451 (Flamingo modern classics) by Ray Bradbury
Buy new: £4.98 / Used from: £2.45 Like Philip K. Dick, Bradbury's not a particularly elegant writer, but it is the eerily-prescient concepts and ideas that set both apart.
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 | Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo
Buy used from: £1.88 A short, sharp, shock. Harrowing, but stunning. Everyone (mothers of sons particularly) should read this. Johnny Got His Gun rivals Catch 22 as the greatest anti-war novel ever written.
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 | The Final Solution by Michael Chabon
Buy new: £5.49 / Used from: £0.01 Oy Vay! This Chabon boy's got chutzpah! Here he takes one of literature's iconic characters - Sherlock Holmes - and crafts an elegy of decrepitude and failing powers with heart-rending poignance.
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 | The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Buy new: £2.99 / Used from: £2.50 Oh-so-bleak, and yet somehow very, very beautiful. It's an apocalyptic novel, yes, but most of all a love story. Less than five pages in it becomes clear you are in the hands of a genius.
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 | All the President's Men by Bob Woodward
Buy used from: £7.50 Exhilarating investigative journalism in which the stakes couldn't be higher. Watch "Woodstein" chase a money trail all the way to the very top, and tighten the noose on Tricky Dicky himself...
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 | Dracula (Vintage Classics) by Bram Stoker
Buy new: £4.00 / Used from: £1.88 |
 | The Green Mile by Stephen King
Buy new: £5.99 / Used from: £0.01 |
 | Charlotte's Web by E.B. White
Buy new: £4.04 / Used from: £0.01 |
 | And Then There Were None (Agatha Christie Collection) by Agatha Christie
Buy new: £4.97 / Used from: £0.10 |
 | Bleak House (Penguin Classics) by Charles Dickens
Buy new: £6.13 / Used from: £1.98 I hesitate to cry this Dickens's finest work, since I've only read four - but surely he can't have written anything greater than this?
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 | Double Indemnity by James M. Cain
Buy used from: £0.01 |
 | A Spy by Nature by Charles Cumming
Buy new: £5.99 / Used from: £0.01 |
 | The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories by Ernest Hemingway
Buy new: £3.47 / Used from: £0.01 The title story is simply the best short story I have ever read. Utterly mesmerising. Hemingway is the master of the short story form, and can make one page say what takes other writers ten.
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 | The Big Sleep: An Philip Marlowe Mystery (Penguin Fiction) by Raymond Chandler
Buy new: £5.99 / Used from: £1.07 |
 | The Stand by Stephen King
Buy new: £6.96 / Used from: £4.56 |
 | The Sound of My Voice (Five Star Paperback) by Ron Butlin
Buy new: £4.87 / Used from: £1.49 |
 | The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins
Buy new: £4.49 / Used from: £3.20 Though Dawkins can come across a mite smug, there's no denying the power of his message, nor the empirical weight behind his argument when set against the fairytale flimsiness of his opponents'.
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 | The Woman in Black by Susan Hill
Buy new: £4.98 / Used from: £0.87 |
 | Fatherland by Robert Harris
Buy new: £5.59 / Used from: £0.01 |
 | The Wind-up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
Buy new: £6.26 / Used from: £4.00 |
 | 1984 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
Buy new: £5.09 / Used from: £2.95 |
 | A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
Buy new: £6.71 / Used from: £1.71 A real "Love It or Hate It" book - and just to be awkward I neither loved it or hated it. ;-) It's good, but does take an awful long time to make a point that's not as profound as it thinks it is.
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 | To Have and Have Not by Ernest Hemingway
Buy new: £4.48 / Used from: £0.01 |
 | The Tenderness of Wolves by Stef Penney
Buy new: £3.98 / Used from: £0.01 I seldom read brand-new titles, but on some instinct I took a punt on this one and fair enjoyed it. A cracking achievement - especially for an agoraphobic who's never set foot in Canada (its setting).
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