What is the best book/novel you have ever read?

This may possibly have been asked before,but here goes.
I’ve read some fantastic authors over the years and just the other day I asked myself this very question. I drifted through the works of many great writers in my quest to find the most memorable books that came to mind, and the Charles Dickens classics etc scored strongly of course, but actually I came back to the novel, two in fact, that impressed me most over a lifetime of reading. Surprisingly these were written by the modern day author Wilbur Smith. Two of his very first novels came to mind. They were “When the lion feeds” and the sequel “A Sparrow Falls” Really great stories about the life of a farmers son in South Africa during the 1840’s. I read many more of his books later but was sadly disappointed at his more recent novels which went a little over the top for me. Those first two though are well worth reading, and for me were hard to put down.