The Shadow of the Torturer
World Fantasy Award winner and the opening of the tetralogy regularly ranked the finest sustained work in SF — the genre's supreme rereader's text, with an academic literature to match.
Series Guide
The Book of the New Sun
by Gene Wolfe
Wolfe's four-volume masterwork: the torturer Severian's unreliable confession from a dying Earth so old the Sun itself needs replacing. The genre's Everest for rereaders.