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Bestselling First Novels

Aravind Adiga, White Tiger.
In India, a man from a poor rural area becomes a chauffeur for a rich man in Delhi and murders his employer.

Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits.
The patriarch of a prominent family tries to keep things the same while Chile is changing around him.

David Baldacci, Absolute Power.
A burglar is framed by the Secret Service for the murder of a woman with whom the President was having an affair.

Jenna Blum, Those Who Save Us.
A history professor researching women’s roles in Nazi Germany uncovers secrets from her mother’s past.

Barbara Taylor Bradford, A Woman of Substance.
Emma Harte turns a small shop into the world’s greatest department store.

Tom Clancy, The Hunt for Red October.
A Soviet submarine commander tries to defect with his state-of-the-art vessel, but his countrymen are in hot pursuit.

Robin Cook, Coma.
A medical student risks her life to investigate when patients who check into the hospital for minor surgery end up in comas.

Debra Dean, The Madonnas of Leningrad.
A Russian émigré with Alzheimer’s recalls her time as a docent at the Hermitage during the Siege of Leningrad.

Anita Diamant, The Red Tent.
The story of Dinah, the daughter of Jacob and Leah.

Kim Edwards, The Memory Keeper’s Daughter.
A doctor delivers his wife’s twins and gives away the one with Down’s Syndrome without her knowledge.

Laura Esquivel, Like Water for Chocolate.
A woman who is forbidden to marry the man she loves because she must care for her mother releases her emotions through her cooking.

Nicholas Evans, The Horse Whisperer.
When an accident on a snowy road injures a young girl and drives her horse mad with pain, her mother takes them across the country to a man renowned for his ability to tame wild horses.

Jamie Ford, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet.
A Chinese-American man who lost his wife to cancer recalls his childhood friendship with a Japanese-American girl who was sent to an internment camp during World War II.

Frederick Forsyth, The Day of the Jackal.
When a top assassin is hired to kill Charles de Gaulle, it seems no one can stop him.     

Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain.
A disillusioned Confederate soldier avoids returning to battle by leaving the hospital before his wound is healed and meets a variety of people on his journey home to the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Lisa Genova, Still Alice.
A Harvard psychology professor learns that she has early onset Alzheimer’s and struggles to cope as the disease progresses.

Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha.
In 1929 Japan, a young girl with unusual eyes is taken from her humble fishing village and trained to be a geisha.

Robert Goolrick, A Reliable Wife.
In 1907, a mail-order bride with a hidden agenda arrives in a small Wisconsin town to marry a man expecting a different woman.

David Guterson, Snow Falling on Cedars.
In the Pacific Northwest after World War II, a community is in conflict when a Japanese-American fisherman is put on trial for murder.

Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time.
An autistic boy discovers his neighbor's dog dead in the yard and decides to find out who killed it.

Nancy Horan, Loving Frank.
A novel based on the true story of an adulterous love affair between Frank Lloyd Wright and a woman whose house he designed.

Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner.
A successful writer returns to his homeland of Afghanistan to rescue the son of his childhood friend whom he once betrayed.

Hillary Jordan, Mudbound.
In 1946, a woman tries to adjust after moving with her husband and two children to an isolated cotton farm in the Mississippi Delta.

Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees.
A girl takes refuge with three sisters who may hold the key to the fate of the her mother.

Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake.
An Indian-American whose parents named him after Gogol feels burdened by his heritage and his odd name.

Stieg Larsson, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Mystery
A disgraced journalist and a disturbed computer hacker are hired to find out what happened to a teenage heiress who vanished 40 years ago.

Janice Y.K. Lee, The Piano Teacher.
In 1952, an Englishwoman comes to Hong Kong with her new husband and has an affair with a man who endured loss during the Japanese occupation.

Stephenie Meyer, Twilight. Science Fiction
Bella starts at a new school and is entranced by Edward—a vampire who has renounced human prey. First in a series.

Jacquelyn Mitchard, The Deep End of the Ocean.
A family is torn apart when a 3-year-old boy goes missing from a Chicago hotel lobby.

Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife.
A woman falls in love with a time traveler who is periodically and uncontrollably swept back and forth through time.

Julie Orringer, The Invisible Bridge.
In 1937, three Hungarian Jewish brothers embark on separate paths, but their lives change as World War II begins.

Ann Packer, The Dive from Clausen’s Pier.
A woman must decide what to do when her fiancé dives into a shallow lake and is paralyzed.

Tom Rachman, The Imperfectionists.
The staff of an English-language newspaper in Rome deal with personal dramas while trying to keep the paper operational.

J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. Juvenile Fiction
Rescued from the outrageous neglect of his aunt and uncle, Harry receives an invitation to attend the Hogwarts School for Wizards.

Tatiana de Rosnay, Sarah’s Key.
An American writer discovers what happened to a family during the 1942 roundup of Jews in Paris.

Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones.
A 14-year-old girl who is murdered is able to observe and touch the lives of those she left behind.

Mary Ann Shaffer & Annie Barrows, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.
In 1946, an author corresponds with the members of a book group that formed during the German occupation of Guernsey in the English Channel.

Helen Simonson, Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand.
In a small English village, a widowed army major forms a friendship with a Pakistani widow who runs the local shop.

Nicholas Sparks, The Notebook.
Reading aloud to a woman in a nursing home, an elderly man recounts their youthful romance and her fateful decision about whether to marry another.

Kathryn Stockett, The Help.
During the Civil Rights era in Mississippi, two black maids agree to talk to a writer about how they are treated by their white employers.

Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club.
The relationships of four American-born daughters and their Chinese mothers who gather for a weekly game of mahjong.

Scott Turow, Presumed Innocent.
A prosecutor is asked to investigate the death of a colleague with whom he had an affair.

Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone.
Twin brothers are born to an Indian nun at a mission hospital in Ethiopia and grow up to become doctors but are separated by an act of betrayal.

Lauren Weisberger, The Devil Wears Prada.
An English major hoping for a job at The New Yorker takes an internship with the demanding editor of a fashion magazine.

David Wroblewski, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle.
A mute boy flees into the Wisconsin woods with three dogs when he suspects his uncle of killing his father.