Fight Club

An unnamed narrator drifts through corporate life plagued by insomnia and a numbing sense of emptiness, medicating his despair with support-group meetings for illnesses he doesn't have and a catalogue-perfect apartment full of things he doesn't need. Then he meets Tyler Durden — a charismatic, anarchic soap-maker who offers a different kind of release.

Together they start a fight club: men meeting in basements to beat one another bloody, chasing the raw aliveness that consumer comfort has bled out of their lives. But the club grows beyond bare-knuckle catharsis into Project Mayhem, an underground movement bent on tearing down the world that made them.

Chuck Palahniuk's debut novel is a savage, blackly funny assault on consumerism, masculinity, and the anaesthetised modern self. Told in terse, hypnotic prose with an unreliable narrator and one of fiction's most infamous twists, Fight Club became a cult classic and the basis for David Fincher's film.