Nine Princes in Amber

A man wakes in a private hospital with no memory, works out within a page that he is being drugged, and bluffs his way out. He has no idea who he is. It takes him a hundred pages to establish that he is a prince of Amber, the one real city, of which every other world — including this one — is only a shadow.

The trick of the book is that the amnesia is the reader's too. Corwin bluffs his way through conversations with siblings whose names he does not know, and we learn the rules of the world at exactly the speed he relearns them. Amber's family can walk between worlds by altering the details of the landscape as they travel, which is one of the great images in fantasy and is explained almost in passing.

It is short, fast, and told in a wisecracking first person that owes more to hardboiled detective fiction than to anything with elves in it. Nine siblings, all of them plausible claimants, none of them trustworthy. It opens a series of five, and the five together are one story.