Intriguing

This week's Booking Through Thursday is:

What’s the most intriguing book you ever read? Something that made you think, explore new ideas, or just be really impressed and awed and amazed at the sheer wonder of the creativity of the thing?

Philip Pulman's His Dark Materials trilogy has always filled me with a sense of wonder and vast potential. The beautiful, vivid descriptions of such a wide range of worlds and the promise of even more unexplored over the horizon gave me a wonderful feeling.

In a completely different sense, Jeff Noon's debut novel Vurt and its sequel Pollen conjured up a much darker cyberpunk dystopia, in which humans, dogs, robots, aliens and spirits interbred to create marvellous and sinister cross-species beings with varied abilities and their own subcultures. The fast-moving plot leaves little time for explanation, so you have to pick up bits and pieces as you go along. That's another world I'd really like to explore at my leisure, look into the history of and figure out how things got the way they did.


I'm always on the lookout for new intriguing novels to explore - are there any that any of you would strongly recommend?