Out of the Silent Planet by C. S. Lewis

I'd never read any of C. S. Lewis' fiction for adults before picking up Out of the Silent Planet -- the first in his Space Trilogy.  Dr Elwin Ransom(modeled after Tolkien, by the way) is on a walking holiday when he is abducted by a former schoolmate and his (evil-scientist-)physicist partner and taken to the planet Malacandra.  When Ransom escapes his human captors, he has to figure out how to survive in an alien (so to speak) environment and distinguish friend from foe.  Being a lover of language and linguistics, I enjoyed watching Ransom (a philologist himself) begin to consider the way language works on Malacandra.  I will probably want to pick up the final two (Perelandra, That Hideous Strength) at some point as well.