Thousand Autumns is a historical romance, set in Japan in 1799. It's epically plot-driven - dense but worth it. Mitchell steps away from the experimental genre-bending he's known for, and fully enters the world of Jacob De Zoet, a Dutch clerk working for the Dutch East Indies Trading Co. It is the only connection Japan has with the west. Jacob falls in love with Orito, a disfigured midwife, while trying to weed out corruption in the company and hold his own against other officers and a sinister Japanese lord ruling a mysterious shrine. Impeccable writing from start to finish.

Against the background of a man tightrope walking between the World Trade Center Towers in 1974, disparate yet interconnecting stories on the streets below weave together in a beautiful portrait of NYC. This is my favorite kind of novel- beautiful and heartbreaking. Let the Great World Spin was deservedly awarded the National Book Award for fiction in 2009.

A newlywed couple travels across the country in a roast turkey, a Jew and an Arab open a restaurant across from the UN building in New York City, and five inanimate objects come alive and attempt to travel to the Holy Land. FUNNY, off the wall, absurd and charming - this was the first Robbins book I read, and I've since read five more. LOVE him.

This gritty detective novel by Pulitzer Prize winning author Michael Chabon inhabits one of the best settings I've ever encountered in a novel. In a gripping alternative version of history, a temporary district was set up in Alaska for Jews fleeing persecution by the Nazis in 1940. As a result, 2 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust insteas of 6 million, an atomic bomb was dropped on Berlin in 1946 and the fledgling state of Israel failed in 1948. Fast forward to 2008- a Jewish man is found dead in a crummy hotel in Sitka, Alaska, an unfinished game of chess on his bedside table. So begins this amazing whodunnit, filled with mystical cows and potential messiahs - a novel only Chabon could do justice.

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter