By Michael Ende
A grieving, bullied boy steals an old book, hides in the school attic to read it, and learns the story can't end unless he steps inside it himself.
Bastian Balthazar Bux is overweight, miserable at school, and dodging a pack of boys who like to make his life hard. His mother is dead. His father has gone quiet with grief and can hardly look at him. One morning he ducks into a bookshop to escape the boys, sees an old book with a strange symbol on the cover, takes it without paying, and shuts himself in the school attic to read, skipping the whole day. Inside the book, a land called Fantastica is being eaten by something called the Nothing. It isn't burned or conquered, just erased, a hole that keeps spreading where the world used to be. A young hunter named Atreyu is sent to find a cure for the dying Childlike Empress, with no weapon and no directions. And then, about halfway through, the book seems to turn and look at Bastian, because the only thing that can save Fantastica is a real human child willing to read the Empress's new name aloud.
This is the longest, densest book on the shelf, and the prose is beautiful and a little odd, so it wants a child who's glad to be lost in a world for a while. If yours finished Narnia and said out loud they wished they could live there, this is the book that takes that wish seriously, then asks what it would actually cost. One thing to know going in: it isn't the movie. The film covers the first half and stops at the pretty part. The book's real story is the second half, where Bastian gets everything he wishes for and it slowly ruins him. The movie never reaches that part at all.