Cat's Cradle

A writer researching what important Americans were doing the day the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima ends up on a Caribbean island governed by a made-up religion called Bokononism, whose central text admits it is built entirely on lies. Vonnegut wrote this in 1963 — the Cold War at its most paranoid, the bomb a fresh horror — and decided the only honest response was to make you laugh while the world ended. Ice-nine, the substance that freezes all water on contact, is the MacGuffin. The real subject is how human beings organize themselves around comforting fictions and what happens when those fictions run out. The funniest novel about apocalypse ever written and the most honest about why we need myths even when we know they're myths.