The Shadow of the Torturer (1980)

Severian's exile from the torturers' guild appears to begin a strange personal journey through a decaying world. Wolfe gradually changes the reader's sense of what that world is and how much a remembered detail might mean. Read the four Book of the New Sun volumes from The Shadow of the Torturer, then the coda The Urth of the New Sun. This completed route is science fantasy at its most demanding: its larger pattern rewards rereading without turning every ambiguity into a solved clue.