The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien (1954)

There is a road that runs from a green hill in the Shire all the way to a mountain of fire, and the creature who must walk it is a hobbit who would rather be home by his own hearth with a second breakfast. _The Lord of the Rings_ rests on one impossible, beautiful idea: that the single object powerful enough to enslave the world can be unmade only by hands too small and too ordinary to want what it offers. Tolkien set this against a world of such depth that it aches, full of Elves who remember the world's first morning, of kingdoms fallen to grass, of languages he invented whole before he wrote a line of the story. The quest is not strength beating evil but endurance outlasting it; at the mountain's very edge even goodness gives out, and the world is saved by mercy rather than might. Few books have made the love of one servant for his master feel like the last brave thing left alive.