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John Banville, The Sea.
A man mourning his wife returns to the seaside resort where 50 years before he spent a holiday that forever changed him. 2005 Booker Prize.

Geraldine Brooks, March.
An imagined account of the Civil War experiences of Mr. March, the father from Louisa May Alcott’s classic Little Women. 2006 Pulitzer Prize.

A. S. Byatt, Possession.
Two academics uncover a love affair between the two Victorian writers they are researching. 1990 Booker Prize.

Peter Carey, Oscar and Lucinda.
In the 19th century, two misfits with a gambling compulsion meet on a ship bound for Australia. 1998 Booker Prize.

Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.
An artist who needs money to bring his family out of Nazi-occupied Prague collaborates with his American cousin to create a comic book hero. 2001 Pulitzer Prize.

John Cheever, The Wapshot Chronicle.
A father and two sons deal with changes in a New England fishing village. 1958 National Book Award.

J. M. Coetzee, Age of Iron.
A dying white South African woman who opposed apartheid comes face to face with the brutal effects of the system. 2003 Nobel Prize.

Michael Cunningham, The Hours.
The lives of three women are connected by Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway. 1999 Pulitzer Prize.

Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss.
A retired judge in India living near the Nepal border finds his tranquil life disrupted by political unrest. 2006 Booker Prize & National Book Critics Circle Award.

E. L. Doctorow, The March.
A vivid account of Sherman's March through Georgia during the Civil War. 2005 National Book Critics Circle Award.

Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex.
The story of a girl who learns that she is a hermaphrodite, what she does about it, and how she came to be that way. 2003 Pulitzer Prize.

Penelope Fitzgerald, Offshore.
An eclectic group of people live on barges on the Thames in the early 1960s. 1979 Booker Prize.

Richard Ford, Independence Day.
A failed sportswriter turned real estate agent has plans with his son for the 4th of July weekend but things don’t go as he hoped. 1996 Pulitzer Prize.

Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain.
A disillusioned Confederate soldier avoids returning to battle by leaving the hospital before his wound heals and embarks on a long journey home. 1997 National Book Award.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera.
A man falls in love with a woman at first sight and courts her over the course of 50 years despite her marriage to another. 1982 Nobel Prize.

Nadine Gordimer, The Pickup.
A wealthy South African woman has an affair with an Arab who’s an illegal alien. 1991 Nobel Prize.

Shirley Ann Grau, The Keepers of the House.
In the Deep South, a widowed white man marries his black housekeeper and has children whose lives are profoundly affected. 1965 Pulitzer Prize.

Oscar Hijuelos, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love.
Two Cuban brothers emigrate to New York City in 1949 and form a band. 1990 Pulitzer Prize.

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Heat and Dust.
An Englishwoman travels to India to learn what became of her grandfather’s first wife who fell in love with a Nawab. 1975 Booker Prize.

Edward Jones, The Known World.
A former slave acquires a small plantation and buys slaves of his own, but as rumors of slave rebellions spread things begin to fall apart. 2004 Pulitzer Prize; 2003 National Book Critics Circle.

Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies.
A collection of short stories focusing mainly on the lives of Indian-Americans. 2000 Pulitzer Prize.

Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn.
A Brooklyn P.I. with Tourette’s Syndrome investigates the murder of his mentor. 1999 National Book Critics Circle Award.

Penelope Lively, Moon Tiger.
A woman dying of cancer reflects on her past and remembers a soldier she loved in Egypt during World War II. 1987 Booker Prize.

Naguib Mahfouz, Palace Walk.
The story of the disintegration of a Cairo family. 1988 Nobel Prize.

Cormac McCarthy, The Road.
A dark and disturbing tale of a father and son who travel down a road to the sea in a post-apocalyptic world. 2007 Pulitzer Prize.

Alice McDermott, Charming Billy.
At an Irish-American wake, stories and memories about the dead man cause feelings to resurface. 1998 National Book Award.

Ian McEwan, Atonement.
A girl makes an accusation that has terrible consequences for her family. 2002 National Book Critics Circle Award.

Toni Morrison, Sula.
Two childhood friends meet again as adults after taking divergent paths in life. 1993 Nobel Prize.

Tim O’Brien, Going after Cacciato.
A group of soldiers in Vietnam who go after an AWOL comrade end up on a surreal journey. 1979 National Book Award.

Orhan Pamuk, Snow.
An exiled poet returns to his Turkish hometown where ethnic and religious tensions rise during a blizzard. 2006 Nobel Prize.

Walker Percy, The Moviegoer.
A man’s search for meaning and happiness takes him through the French Quarter at Mardi Gras. 1962 National Book Award.

Richard Powers, Echo Maker.
When a woman’s brother emerges from a coma and believes she is an impostor, she turns to a neurologist for help. 2006 National Book Award.

Reynolds Price, Kate Vaiden.
A woman haunted by the murder-suicide of her parents seeks the child she gave up as a teen. 1986 National Book Critics Circle Award.

E. Annie Proulx, The Shipping News.
After losing his cheating wife, a man moves to Newfoundland with his two young daughters and elderly aunt and writes for the local paper. 1994 Pulitzer Prize; 1993 National Book Award.

Marilynne Robinson, Gilead.
An elderly preacher writes a letter to his son filled with reflections on life and stories of their family history dating back to the Civil War. 2005 Pulitzer Prize; 2004 National Book Critics Circle.

Philip Roth, Goodbye Columbus.
A young man from the poor section of Newark has a summer romance with an upper class girl from the suburbs. 1960 National Book Award.

Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things.
A divorced woman brings her twin children home to a small village where a tragedy unfolds. 1997 Booker Prize

Richard Russo, Empire Falls.
In a town long abandoned by industry, a man who left college to help his family observes the people who frequent the local grill. 2002 Pulitzer Prize.

Carol Shields, The Stone Diaries.
The story of a woman whose life spans the 20th century, from childhood to marriage to success late in life as a garden columnist. 1995 Pulitzer Prize.

Graham Swift, Last Orders.
On a trip to a seaside town to scatter the ashes of their friend, four men reminisce about their past. 1996 Booker Prize.

John Kennedy Toole, Confederacy of Dunces.
A series of mishaps forces a loner to seek a variety of odd jobs. 1981 Pulitzer Prize.

Anne Tyler, The Accidental Tourist.
A travel writer who lost his son and wife moves back home and tentatively embarks on a new life. 1985 National Book Critics Circle Award.

Eudora Welty, The Optimist’s Daughter.
A woman comes home to be with her father who is undergoing an eye operation. 1973 Pulitzer Prize.

Herman Wouk, The Caine Mutiny.
Officers on a minesweeper in the Pacific who fear for the safety of their ship in the hands of an erratic captain relieve him of command and are court-martialed for mutiny. 1952 Pulitzer Prize.