My Top 5 Books of Recent Time - Fiction

I was going to call this list My Top 5 Books of All Time, until I noticed that I had read all of them in the last 3 years. In no particular order. Here are the books, a short comment, and the opening lines. I have only included two here, but they are definites in the top five.

Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis
Achingly beautiful, moving, subtle, rereadable. A tale of sacrifice and love and triumph. Lewis described it as his best work, who am I to argue.

I am old now and have not much to fear from the anger of gods. I have neither husband nor child, nor hardly a friend, through whom they can hurt me. My body, this lean carrion that still has to be washed and fed and have clothes hung about it daily with so many changes, they may kill as soon as they please. The succession is provided for. My crown passes to my nephew.

Watership Down, by Richard Adams
Who could predict that a 20 something year old male would choose a book about rabbits for a favourite. Yet I have. Rereadable, entrancing, a tale of conflict and friendship, of loyalty and love. Sniff.

The primroses were over. Toward the edge of the wood, where the ground became open and sloped down to an old fence and a brambly ditch beyond, only a few fading patches of pale yello still showed among the dog's mercury and oak-tree roots.