1. This beautiful life: Helen Schulman
The Bergamots move from a comfortable upstate college town to New York City, they are not quite sure how they will adapt, or what to make of the strange new world of well-to-do Manhattan.
2. Cloud atlas: David Mitchell
Brilliantly original fiction that reveals how disparate people connect, how their fates intertwine, and how their souls drift across time like clouds across the sky. (amazon)
3. Life of Pi: Yann Martel
Pi Patel is an unusual boy. The son of a zookeeper, he has an encyclopedic knowledge of animal behavior, a fervent love of stories, and practices not only his native Hinduism, but also Christianity and Islam. When Pi is sixteen, his family emigrates from India to North America aboard a Japanese cargo ship, along with their zoo animals bound for new homes.(amazon)
4. State of wonder, Ann Patchett
Marina Singh is sent by her boss at Vogel, a drug manufacturer, to the jungles of Brazil following the death of a co-worker. It is there that the company is looking into a miracle drug based on a tree bark used by a native tribe. Upon her arrival, Marina must find out the circumstances of her colleague's death, as well as find out why work has slowed to a crawl on the drug. That means dealing with Annick Swenson, a determined researcher who Marina has a complicated relationship with.
5. The lost symbol: Dan Brown
Symbologist Robert Langdon returns in this new thriller follow-up to The Da Vinci Code.
6. Wolf Hall: Hilary Mantel
Assuming the power recently lost by the disgraced Cardinal Wolsey, Thomas Cromwell counsels a mercurial Henry VIII on the latter's efforts to marry Anne Boleyn against the wishes of Rome, a successful endeavor that comes with a dangerous price.
7. Worth dying for, Lee Child
In the corn country of Nebraska, ex-police officer Jack Reacher runs afoul of the local Duncan clan--and its criminal connections--when he investigates a decades-old, unsolved case of a missing child.
8. Fifty Shades of Grey, E.L. James
When literature student Anastasia Steele is drafted to interview the successful young entrepreneur Christian Grey for her campus magazine, she finds him attractive, enigmatic and intimidating. Convinced their meeting went badly, she tries to put Grey out of her mind - until he happens to turn up at the out-of-town hardware store where she works part-time. Erotic, amusing, and deeply moving, the Fifty Shades Trilogy is a tale that will obsess you, possess you, and stay with you forever.
9. The Paris wife: Paula McLain
A remarkable period of time and a love affair between two unforgettable people: Ernest Hemingway and his wife Hadley.
10. Brothers no more: William F. Buckley
Set against the history of the second half of the twentieth century, a novel follows the unlikely friendship between two World War II servicemen--one of them the president's grandson, both of them devoted to the same woman.(amazon)
