[Hugh Manatee]

One I like and usually recommend, the Titus Groan/Gormenghast books by Mervyn Peake. It's a little mellodramatic(I think thats the term for it), the characters are all very "big" they tend to play to extremes of their personality traits,and the scenarios are a bit far out, but somehow realistic in ways that fantasy novels tend to not be. For example no elves, dwarves, magicks, or fantasy creatures like dragons. However what is there is pretty far out enough not to need stuff like that, for example there is the castle Gormenghast, roughly the size of downtown new york with sky scraping towers(as the book says something to the effect of "thrusting upwards like blasphemous fingers at the gods"), the denizens of which adhere to a set of dogmatic rituals, some comedically absurd, which dictate exactly what everyone should be doing, from the 76th Earl of the castle, the depressed Lord Sepulchrave Groan, all the way down to Steerpike, an ambitious guy who's destiny(and all the generations of his children's) to scrub the floor of the kitchens untill one fateful chance encounter one morning where he get's his opportunity to escape and plot his future rise to power in the castle. Born into this chaos and ritual is Titus groan, Earl #77. There's lots of fun subplots and stories which interweave, some funny, some scary, some tragic, but it's all good.

If you're not sure what you want in a book, take a shot at the Gormenghast/titus groan searies, they're 3 books, Titus Groan, Gormenghast and Titus Alone(third book leaves the castle setting behind, I haven't gotten to it yet, but I'm almost there, and is supposed to set up his further life of adventures, but Peake died after writing it, and the series stops there, it's kinda like the Firefly of literature....) . You can get them in 1 volume with some interesting articles and essays in the back.

Also the BBC did a miniseries production of the books, it's pretty good, covers the first 2 books and focuses more on steerpike and the castle. You can get the R1 DVD of it, comes with all kinds of neat special features and documenteries.