A Game of Thrones

A king rides north to ask his old friend to come and govern for him, and over the next seven hundred pages that ordinary favour dismantles two families and most of a continent. The machinery is a succession crisis: an heir who may not be the king's, a queen's family with its own plans, an exiled dynasty across the sea, and a wall at the top of the world that everyone is too busy to man.

The structure is what makes it work — every chapter belongs to one character and sees only what that person sees, so the reader assembles a conspiracy that nobody inside the book can see whole. It also means the story has no protagonist to hide behind, which Martin demonstrates in a way that people still talk about thirty years later.

It is a fantasy novel that spends most of its time on logistics, inheritance law and who owes whom a favour, with the supernatural kept at the edges and used sparingly. That restraint is the reason the dragons land when they finally arrive. Be warned that the series it opens is unfinished, and has been for a long time.