Join Douglas Adams’s hapless hero Arthur Dent as he travels the galaxy with his intrepid pal Ford Prefect, getting into horrible messes and generally wreaking hilarious havoc. Dent is grabbed from Earth moments before a cosmic construction team obliterates the planet to build a freeway. You’ll never read funnier science fiction; Adams is a master of intelligent satire, barbed wit, and comedic dialogue. The Hitchhiker’s Guide is rich in comedic detail and thought-provoking situations and stands up to multiple reads. Required reading for science fiction fans, this book (and its follow-ups) is also sure to please fans of Monty Python, Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series, and British sitcoms

“The story so far: In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move. Many races believe that it was created by some sort of god, though the Jatravartid people of Viltvodle VI believe that the entire Universe was in fact sneezed out of the nose of a being called the Great Green Arkleseizure. The Jatravartids, who live in perpetual fear of the time they call The Coming of The Great White Handkerchief, are small blue creatures with more than fifty arms each, who are therefore unique in being the only race in history to have invented the aerosol deodorant before the wheel.” As this popularly acclaimed, internationally best-selling sequel to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy opens, the hapless Earthman Arthur Dent has just escaped certain death on the planet Magrathea. He now faces certain death from a Vogon spaceship, unless the ghost of ex-Galactic President Zaphod Beeblebrox’s grandfather can lend a spectral helping hand. As he must, because Zaphod must fulfill a mission he’s totally forgotten about—to search for the man who truly rules the universe. Naturally, there’s time for everyone to stop for a bite to eat at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe first… In general, these first two books—The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and this volume—are considered to be the definitive books in the Hitchhiker’s series. Part of the reason why this is so may be because these first two books follow to a significant degree the plotline of the BBC radio series that inspired them, although the events are somewhat rearranged and some additional incidents added. The subsequent books take the story in an entirely new direction, far past the timeline of the radio series

This international bestseller is the third installment (of five) in the zany space opera known as the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Ford Prefect and Arthur Dent have been stranded for five years on prehistoric Earth. They escape from this predicament via a Chesterfield sofa and arrive at a cricket match, where they are immediately faced with their next challenge: preventing the release of an imprisoned race of xenophobic aliens bent on exterminating all other life forms in the universe. Fans of the BBC TV show Doctor Who will be interested to note that the novel is a reworked treatment for a proposed film based on the series. And more detail-oriented types may want to know that the American version of the book has some additional text concerning the galactic rudeness of the word Belgium, which allows Belgium to be used throughout as profanity instead of a four-letter word beginning with F that's used in the British edition

The quest continues in the fourth volume in the ever-popular Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series. Against all odds, at the eleventh hour, and in the unlikeliest place of all, the intrepid Arthur Dent finds the girl of his dreams. After eight years and about 100,000 lightyears of intergalactic travel, he is looking a little down-at-the-heels himself, and she is heavily sedated because she thinks she is a hedgehog. She is also in the company of a brother that Arthur wouldn’t wish on a Vogon. But they are both in search of God’s Final Message to His Creation, and hey, this time they might actually find it

The fifth and final volume in the humorous SF series that began with THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY is somewhat darker than its predecessors. The Earthman Arthur Dent spends years selling genetic material in exchange for travel to various parallel universes in search of somewhere vaguely resembling his home planet. When he finally settles (actually, crash lands) on a backwater planet, his pleasant new career as tribal sandwich-maker is interrupted by the arrival of his daughter, Random–the result of those many, many sales of his DNA. Meanwhile, Arthur's friend Ford Prefect discovers that the happy-go-lucky executives of his employer, the publishers of THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY, have been replaced by a frighteningly grim and worryingly familiar new management team. His plot to disturb their business plan puts him once again into Arthur's path...with devastating results