Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban (1980)

I only knew Hoban by his children's stories, but this novel is nothing of the sort and, well, there's no other way to say it - Riddley Walker is a masterpiece. Set in SE England, many generations after a nuclear apocalypse, a remnant population grasps at fragments of language, technology and legend as they try to reconstruct the 'clevver' times. Courageously written in a crude, bastardised English that presents an immediate barrier to the reader, it is this striking language that ultimately feeds the rich, mysterious and desperate atmosphere of the novel and lifts it into something truly remarkable. Russell Hoban died last year.

We by Yevgeny Zamyatin (1921)

Orwell’s 1984 & Huxley’s Brave New World owe this work a (not always acknowledged) debt. Written in 1920 and banned by the Soviets before publication, We is set in the 32nd century where society, known as One State, allows its citizens no freedom in order to safeguard them from crime and secure their ‘happiness’. The story follows D-503 (people have numbers, not names), a respected mathematician, who comes to question what One State stands for. Eerily prescient of the Stalinist and Nazi horrors that were just around the corner, Zamyatin’s dystopian sci-fi trailblazer retains a freshness you might not expect from a novel now 90 years old.