One night a little while back, I was in the mood for something easy to read and in an escapist vein, so I left work reasonably early and hit the city library for a browse; eventually, I settled on the first of these omnibus volumes (each contains two novels which were originally published separately - the first, The Shadow of the Torturer and The Claw of the Conciliator, and the second, The Sword of the Lictor and The Citadel of the Autarch), mainly because of the glowing endorsements on the back from Kim Stanley Robinson (who I haven't read) and Ursula Le Guin and George R R Martin (both of whom I have read and reckon are ace) and the blurb-y bit stating that it was "[r]ecently voted the greatest fantasy of all time, after The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit".
And, indeed, it's good - twisting and sinister but never gratuitously so, written in a strikingly ornate and formal, and at times windily philosophical, style, and consistently gripping...pulling, as the adage goes, like a steam train while sketching in the internal landscape of the ambiguous hero, Severian the journeyman torturer, and the external world of Urth [and settings will seem strangely familiar], an echoed reverberation of our own society thousands if not millions of years in the future, in which high technology and interstellar contact mingle with neo-feudalism and medieval exigencies of survival and faith. There's a lot going on, too - apart from the philosophical musings about reality and truth, there is a graceful wreathing of unreliable narration and 'rememories' and other well-handled filigree, and again always well-integrated with the wider concerns of the story and series as a whole. It's strikingly literary without losing any of the power of the best epic fantasy to transport the reader to someplace else; I'd put it below Stephen Donaldson but would probably consider it to be pretty much as good as anything else out there in the field.
