The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: The Illustrated Edition

· Del Rey
4.6
491 reviews
Ebook
304
Pages

About this ebook

This beautifully illustrated edition of the New York Times bestselling classic celebrates the 42nd anniversary of the original publication—with all-new art by award-winning illustrator Chris Riddell.
 
SOON TO BE A HULU SERIES • “An astonishing comic writer.”—Neil Gaiman

Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read


It’s an ordinary Thursday morning for Arthur Dent . . . until his house gets demolished. The Earth follows shortly after to make way for a new hyperspace express route, and Arthur’s best friend has just announced that he’s an alien.

After that, things get much, much worse.

With just a towel, a small yellow fish, and a book, Arthur has to navigate through a very hostile universe in the company of a gang of unreliable aliens. Luckily the fish is quite good at languages. And the book is The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy . . . which helpfully has the words DON’T PANIC inscribed in large, friendly letters on its cover.

Douglas Adams’s mega-selling pop-culture classic sends logic into orbit, plays havoc with both time and physics, offers up pithy commentary on such things as ballpoint pens, potted plants, and digital watches . . . and, most important, reveals the ultimate answer to life, the universe, and everything.

Now, if you could only figure out the question. . . .

Ratings and reviews

4.6
491 reviews
A Google user
October 28, 2011
On the day the earth was wiped out, ape-descendant Arthur Dent was busy trying to save his house from demolition, lying in the mud while his home was menaced by bulldozers attempting to make way for a new bypass. By an amazing coincidence in a story full of amazing coincidences, the earth stood in the way of a brand new hyperspatial express route. And thus it’s destruction at the hands of the painfully bureaucratic Vogons, a destruction that Arthur barely missed when he was saved by his friend, Ford Prefect who, unbeknownst to Arthur, was in fact an alien who had spent far too much time on earth collecting far too little information for the unbelievably massive Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. And so begins a tale that has become an enduring cult classic, told and retold in various media, and in this version, the first of several novels by Douglas Adams, definitely worth the read. Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is wonderfully entertaining!
A Google user
October 5, 2012
I've lost track of how many times I've read this smart and funny book, along with the others in the series. It's in my all-time top ten.
Liz Byler
July 19, 2013
I have always loved this book! I was very happy to be able to get it on my phone. Unfortunately in this digital edition there are many typos so I had to take off a star. Fix the errors and it would be 5 stars.
1 person found this review helpful

About the author

Douglas Adams was born in 1952 and created all the various and contradictory manifestations of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: radio, novels, TV, computer games, stage adaptations, comic book, and bath towel. He was born in Cambridge and lived with his wife and daughter in Islington, London, before moving to Santa Barbara, California, where he died suddenly in 2001.

Chris Riddell, the 2015–2017 UK Children’s Laureate, is an accomplished artist and the political cartoonist for the Observer. He has enjoyed great acclaim for his books for children. He has won a number of major prizes, including the 2001, 2004, and 2016 CILIP Kate Greenaway Medals. His book Goth Girl and the Ghost of a Mouse won the Costa Children’s Book Award 2014. Riddell has been honored with an OBE in recognition of his illustration and charity work. He lives in Brighton with his family.

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