Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle, 1963

An unintentional ‘wampeter’ of Vonnegut’s own design around which agnostics still flock – even after more than forty years, unsurprisingly perhaps, it remains particularly well-judged as a hefty swipe at religion and shows precisely how humans are all running around chasing after the wrong things. Vonnegut’s invented religion of Bokononism – like Taoism with added determinism – is the real centrepiece, with the deadly Ice-Nine almost a macguffin and the ensemble of characters all playing bit-parts to a much bigger story. It’s three-quarters of the way through that it dawns on you how well put together Bokononism, and Cat’s Cradle itself, really is; a lesser talent would have made this twice as long and only half as entertaining. Highly recommended, not least because it gave the English language some truly useful neologisms.   PY

•  Cat’s Cradle was shortlisted for the 1964 Hugo Award for Best Novel.

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