This is a great book about the haunting loneliness of being utterly alone, not to mention a classic novel that laid the foundations for the horror genre. Read this, but don't watch the movie!

The premise of Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle, like his other novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, is that things are not always what they seem, and indeed that the very nature of reality is loosely defined. This is exemplified in the book's strange ending, in which the reader returns to a reality more closely related to our own (in fact, it probably is our own!).

The 'thinking moments' of the book are overwhelmed by the random parts of the book though. Having said that though, the most profound parts of the book are when Dick returns to the central theme of questioning reality: namely the parts dealing with the forgery of Civil War era artifacts. Indeed, Dick asks, if the viewer cannot discern fake from real with his senses, then how can one ever know what is real?