The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

The story that started it all and spawned a series of film adaptations that have become the stuff of silver screen legend: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum is in fact the first in a series of novels set in Oz, but it is by far the most famous. Published right at the turn of the century in the year 1900, the novel's fantastical setting - a world inhabited by zany creatures and terrifying villains - is a perfect sort of quaint escapism for modern readers who wish to leave their world behind, as its heroine Dorothy Gale does