Eat, Pray and Love by Elizabeth Gilbert

In her early thirties, Elizabeth Gilbert had everything that a modern American woman is supposed to want, husband, country home, successful career, but instead of feeling happy and fulfilled, she felt consumed by panic and confusion. The book tells the story of how she left behind all those outward signs of success and what she found in its place. Following a divorce and a crushing depression , Gilbert set out to examine three different parts of her nature, set against the backdrop of three different cultures, pleasure in Italy, devotion in India and on the Indonesian island of Bali, a balance between worldly enjoyment and divine transcendence.

The Piano Teacher by Janice Y. K. Lee

IN 1942, Will Truesdale an Englishman newly arrived in Hong Kong falls passionately in love with Trudy Liang, a beautiful Eurasian socialite. But, their affair is threatened by the invasion of the Japanese as World War II overwhelms their lives.

Ten year later, Claire Pendleton comes to Hong Kong and is hired by the wealthy Chen family as their daughter's piano teacher. Seduced by the colony's heady social life, she soon begins an affair, only to discover that her lover is hiding a devastating past. As the threads of this spellbound novel intertwine, impossible choices emerge between love and safety, courage and survival, the present and above all, the past.

MUDBOUND by Hillary Jordan

When Henry McAllan moves his city-bred wife, Laura, to a cotton farm in the Mississippi Delta in 1946, she finds herself in a place that is both foreign and frightening. As the McAllan's are tested in every way two celebrated soldiers of World War II return home to help work on the farm. Ronsel Jackson is the eldest son of a black sharecropper who live on the McAllan farm. Jamie is everything that his older brother Henry is not.

Mudbound reveals how everyone becomes a player in a tragedy on the grandest scale as they strive for love and honor.

Pope Joan by Donna Woolfolk Cross

Brilliant and talented, Joan rebels against the medieval social structures that forbid women to learn. When her brother is brutally killed, during a Viking attack, Joan takes up his cloak and his identity and enters the monastery of Fulda. As brother John, Joan distinguishes herself as a great scholar and healer. Eventually, she is drawn to Rome, where she become enmeshed in a dangerous web of love, passion and politics. She finally attains the highest office in Christendom wielding a power greater than any woman before or since. But, such power always comes at a price.

The Dark Ages come to life in all their brutal splendor. It is the story of a woman whose strength of vision led her to defy the social restrictions of the day.

BRIGHT SHINY MORNING BY JAMES FREY

This book is a sweeping chronicle of contemporary Los Angeles that is bold, exhilarating and utterly original.

Dozens of characters pass along the readers sight lines. some never to be seen again. But, James Frey lingers on a handful of LA's lost souls and captures the dramatic narrative of their lives. There is a bright, ambitious young Mexican-American who allows her future to be undone by a moment of searing humiliation. There is a supremely narcissistic movie star whose passion for the unattainable object of his passion nearly destroys him. There is a couple, both nineteen years old who flee their hometown and struggle to survive on the fringes of the great city,. There is an aging Venice Beach alcoholic whose life is turned upside down when a meth-addled teen shows up half dead outside the restroom that he calls home.

The book illuminates the joys, horrors, and unexpected fortunes of life and death in Los Angeles.

THE SHADOW OF THE WIND by CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON

Barcelona, 1945: A city slowly heals from its war wounds, and Daniel, an antiquarian book dealer's son who mourns the loss of his mother, finds solace in a mysterious book entitled, THE SHADOW OF THE WIND, by one Julian Carax. But, when he sets out to find the author's other works, he makes a shocking discovery: someone has been systematically destroying every copy of every book that Carax has written. In fact, Daniel, may have the last of Carax's books in existence. Soon Daniel's seemingly innocent quest opens a door into one of Barcelona's darkest secrets.

This is an epic story of murder, madness and doomed love.

THE RELUCTANT FUNDAMENTALIST BY MOHSIN HAMID

At a cafe table in LAHORE, a bearded Pakistani man converses with an uneasy, American stranger. As dusk deepens to night, he begins the tale that has brought them to this fateful encounter.

Changez is living an immigrant's dream of America. At the top of his class in Princeton, he is snapped up by an elite valuation firm. He thrives on the energy of New York, and his budding romance with elegant and beautiful Erica promises entry into Manhattan society at the same exhalted level once occupied by his own family back in Laghore.

But, in the wake of September 11, Changez finds his position in his adopted city suddenly overturned and his relationship with Erica shifting. And Changez's own identity is in seismic shift as well, unearthing allegiances more fundamental than money, power and maybe even, love.