Eragon

A farm boy finds a blue stone in the mountains, and the stone turns out to be an egg. What follows is the shape every reader will recognise — the mentor, the burned farm, the sword with a name, the empire, the flight across a map — executed straight, without irony, at full length.

The fact usually attached to it is that Paolini wrote it at fifteen and his family published it themselves before Knopf picked it up, and both the strengths and the weaknesses follow from that. The dragon Saphira and the business of learning to fly her are genuinely well done. The debts to Star Wars and to Tolkien are not hidden, and the prose reaches for a register it cannot always hold.

It is best read as what it is: a teenager writing the book he most wanted to exist, with total commitment and no embarrassment. For a lot of readers it was the first fat fantasy novel they finished on their own, and that is not nothing.