The Crying of Lot 49

Suffused with rich satire, chaotic brilliance, verbal turbulence and wild humour, The Crying of Lot 49 opens as Oedipa Maas discovers that she haas been made executrix of a former lover's estate.

Utterly bizarre in the best possible way, The Crying of Lot 49 is an insane ride. It might be short but it's so richly written and so packed that you feel like you've had a million ideas poured into your brain at high speed; Jacobean revenge plays, a centuries-old feud between two mail distribution companies, an unhinged German psychotherapist who tries to medicate his patients with LSD, the CIA, right wing historians, Nazi medical interns, secret languages and somehow at the same time, grief, expectation, aging, the importance of old friendship and a myriad other important themes.
I hope I'm not making it sound gimmicky here, because it isn't, it's a deep, complex and moving story, just set in a psychedelic, confusing reality. I'd never read anything quite like it before and it's burned into my consciousness now. I even have a post horn symbol tattooed on my hand. Something you'll understand once you've read it - which you should immediately do!