Bradbury’s first story collection is a must-read for any fan of the genre, spinning stardust and cobwebs in its wondrous wake.

It contains twenty-seven stories, from science fiction’s master storyteller.

Hear the music, see the lights, shrug off life’s worries and enter a place where dreams are not dreams, and wishes can be real.

All this awaits two boys trembling on the brink of manhood. But entering the smoke, mazes and mirrors, they will discover that not all dreams are worth the cost that must be paid . . .

Ray Bradbury’s seminal tale of life in small-town America is as prescient today as it was sixty years ago.

Over 1 million copies sold in the UK.

Guy Montag is a fireman. His job is to burn books, which are forbidden, being the source of all discord and unhappiness. Even so, Montag is unhappy; there is discord in his marriage. Are books hidden in his house? The Mechanical Hound of the Fire Department, armed with a lethal hypodermic, escorted by helicopters, is ready to track down those dissidents who defy society to preserve and read books.

The classic novel of a post-literate future, ‘Fahrenheit 451’ stands alongside Orwell’s ‘1984’ and Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ as a prophetic account of Western civilization’s enslavement by the media, drugs and conformity.

Bradbury’s powerful and poetic prose combines with uncanny insight into the potential of technology to create a novel which over fifty years from first publication, still has the power to dazzle and shock.

If El Greco had painted miniatures in his prime, no bigger than your hand, infinitely detailed, with his sulphurous colour and exquisite human anatomy, perhaps he might have used this man’s body for his art?

Yet the Illustrated Man has tried to burn the illustrations off. He’s tried sandpaper, acid, and a knife. Because, as the sun sets, the pictures glow like charcoals, like scattered gems. They quiver and come to life. Tiny pink hands gesture, tiny mouths flicker as the figures enact their stories – voices rise, small and muted, predicting the future.

Here are sixteen tales: sixteen illustrations? the seventeenth is your own future told on the skin of the Illustrated Man.