What is the best book you have ever read?

[damnedgrubble]

I think mine has to be (at least at the moment) The House at the End of Hope Street because I grew up not far from there.

Which is your favourite book and why?

His Dark Materials trilogy
Adrian Mole (Secret Diary and Growing Pains)
Malory Towers
Nineteen Eighty Four

Can I choose two?

Non-fiction: A Night to Remember by Walter Lord. What an utterly compelling book. It's basically a linear timeline of the sinking of the Titanic, comprising eyewitness accounts. It led me to read the original narratives of those eyewitnesses, along with many other firsthand accounts of the sinking. The composite reading has completely changed my understanding of what happened that night - it genuinely opened my eyes to the amount of untruths that are currently considered to be facts.

Fiction: And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie. Possibly the most frightening and eerie book I've ever read but truly a masterpiece of the genre, and utterly shocking in its denouement.

Oh, I want to choose more! Dracula for horror, Mapp and Lucia for comedy, Pride and Prejudice for romance...eek!

Of Mice and Men
Wild Swans
Time and Time Again
The Ice Beneath Her
The Narnia books

I need to add The Collector, The Road and God of Small Things. My mind went blank before.

Snow Falling on Cedars
The Line of Beauty
Birdsong
Anything by Kate Atkinson
Pat Barker

Mo Hayder- Birdman
Terry Hayes- I am Pilgrim
Steinbeck- East of Eden

So many good books are listed here. However im suprised that anyone would like Little Women. Also, i really really wanted to enjoy Cloud Atlas but it is one of the very few books that i couldnt finish.

I loved I am pilgrim.
Also anything from John Irving and Stephen King ( hence my username!)

I haven't seen The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera or Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut mentioned here yet but they are both books that have stuck with me a long time after reading them.

I love lots of the others that posters have added already so I didn't want to repeat a long list!

Empire of the Sun by JG Ballard
Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
Life After Life by Kate Atkinson
The Northern Lights Trilogy by Phillip Pullman
The Light Between The Oceans by ML Stedman

The Cornish Trilogy by Robertson Davies