Hitch-hikers Guide to the Galaxy

It's an ordinary Thursday lunchtime for Arthur Dent until his house gets demolished. The Earth follows shortly afterwards to make way for a new hyperspace bypass and his best friend has just announced that he's an alien. At this moment, they're hurtling through space with nothing but their towels and an innocuous-looking book inscribed with the big, friendly words: DON'T PANIC.

And that's just the first twenty or so pages. What follows is the ultimate adventure, spanning space, time and improbability as Arthur and his friend Ford are subjected to Vogon poetry, steal an intergalactic ship that relies on the unlikeliest of statistics to drive it, meet the man who designed the fjords of Norway and get shot out of an airlock.

Much loved and revered, it spawned four more sequels in the trilogy and even a sixth book by Eoin Colfer. It's always silly, always more intelligent than you realise and always questioning the simple things around us that we take for granted every single day. The madcap adventures through the space-time continuum all have one simple motive: what is the answer? In fact, now you mention it, what's the question? The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is officially one of the funniest books ever written.