Author: Ernest Cline
Genre: Fantasy, Sci-Fi
Format: Paperback

Description:
Like most of humanity, Wade Watts escapes his grim surroundings by spending his waking hours jacked into the OASIS, a sprawling virtual utopia that lets you be anything you want to be, a place where you can live and play and fall in love on any of ten thousand planets.
And like most of humanity, Wade dreams of being the one to discover the ultimate lottery ticket that lies concealed within this virtual world. For somewhere inside this giant networked playground, OASIS creator James Halliday has hidden a series of fiendish puzzles that will yield massive fortune and remarkable power to whoever can unlock them.
For years, millions have struggled fruitlessly to attain this prize, knowing only that Hallidays riddles are based in the pop culture he loved that of the late twentieth century. And for years, millions have found in this quest another means of escape, retreating into happy, obsessive study of Hallidays icons. Like many of his contemporaries, Wade is as comfortable debating the finer points of John Hughes oeuvre, playing Pac Man, or reciting Devo lyrics as he is scrounging power to run his OASIS rig.
And then Wade stumbles upon the first puzzle.Suddenly the whole world is watching, and thousands of competitors join the hunt among them certain powerful players who are willing to commit very real murder to beat Wade to this prize. Now the only way for Wade to survive and preserve everything he knows is to win. But to do so, he may have to leave behind his oh so perfect virtual existence and face up to life and love in the real world hes always been so desperate to escape.