Hyperion by Dan Simmons (click here for a link to Amazon) is a Hugo and Locus Award winning novel and definitively one of the best book I’ve ever read.
The story is modeled after the Canterbury Tales as six people on a pilgrimage to the mysterious planet Hyperion are telling their own stories, trying to figure out what they have in common. On a pure litterary level, the book is amazingly written as each of the six story is told in a different litterary style (philosophy, romance, poetry, history, cyberpunk, …)
This is such a vast and rich tapestry of worlds and characters that it makes little justice to the book trying to summarize it in a few lines. It was followed by “The Fall of Hyperion” and a few years later by “Endymion” and “The Rise of Endymion”.
I recenlty gave this book as a birthday gift to a friend of mine who hates everything scifi-y. She read the novel over the weekend and called in sick at work the next Monday to finish it 