Carrie

Carrie is Stephen King's debut novel, the book the publisher says set him on the road to the career he has today. Carrie White is sixteen and painfully shy, the easy target of her classmates at her small-town Maine school. At home, her mother's fierce religion offers no comfort, and nobody notices the strange gift that lets her move things with her mind.

King tells the story through news reports, interviews and testimony gathered after the event, so dread builds from the opening pages. The novel is short, raw and furious, and it still hits hard decades after it first appeared. It suits anyone who has ever felt cast out, and anyone curious where King's long career began.