| Charles Baxter | Shadow Play | Michigan short story writer and novelist takes on 80’s ethics and its impact on families in a small community with a chemical plant. |
| Amy Bloom | Come to Me | Short Stories. |
| Geraldine Brooks | March | 2006 Pulitzer Prize winning novel of Civil War time. |
| Geraldine Brooks | People of the Book | Inspired by a true story. |
| Bill Bryson | The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid | Bryson's memoir of his childhood. |
| Pearl S. Buck | The Good Earth | 1932 Pulitzer Prize winning novel |
| Sandra Cisneros | Caramelo | Mexican/American history, family love. |
| Paulo Coelho | Eleven Minutes | Best selling Brazilian novelist |
| J.M. Coetzee | Disgrace | Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. |
| Jill Ker Conway | The Road from Coorain | Memoir of Conway’s journey from an Australian sheep farm to America. She eventually became the first woman president of Smith College. |
| Michael Cunningham | Hours | |
| Edwidge Danticat | Breath, Eyes, Memory | The wonder, terror and heartache of Danticat’s native Haiti and its women. |
| Peter Ho Davies | The Welsh Girl | North Wales just after D-Day |
| Junot Diaz | The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao | |
| Joan Didion | The Year of Magical Thinking | Reflects a portrait of marriage and a life, in good times and bad. |
| Jack Driscoll | Wanting Only to be Heard | Poignant stories about hard men by Interlochen writer. |
| Kim Edwards | The Memory Keeper's Daughter | A fathers disavowal of a newborn daughter with Downs Syndrome. |
| Ralph Ellison | Invisible Man | A journey across the racial divide. |
| Louise Erdrich | The Master Butchers Singing Club | Immigrants settle in the fictional town of Erdrich's previous novels, Argus, N.Dakota following WWI. |
| Lisa Huang Fleischman | Dream of the Walled City | Inspired by the author's early feminist Chinese grandmother. |
| Franklin Foer | How Soccer Explains the World | Soccer and the global economy |
| Michael Frayn | Headlong | English playwright, novelist and journalist. Shortlisted for 1999 Booker Prize. |
| Kay Gibbons | Ellen Foster | 11 year old orphan in American South. Oprah selection |
| Sara Gruen | Water for Elephants | Story of a man's life in the circus in Depression era America. |
| Bryan Gruley | Starvation Lake | mystery |
| Ernest Hemingway | Nick Adams Stories | Memorable character grows from child to adolescent to soldier, veteran, writer and parent. |
| Nancy Horan | Loving Frank | Novel about Frank Lloyd Wright's scandalous life. |
| Khaled Hosseini | Kite Runner | Kabul in the 1970s from fall of the monarchy to The Taliban. ALA Notable Book. |
| Pam Houston | Cowboys Are My Weakness | Strong shrewd and funny. |
| Linda Lawrence Hunt | Bold Spirit | Helga Estby's forgotten walk across victorian America. |
| Zora Neale Hurston | Their Eyes Were Watching God | An independent black woman in the 30's. |
| William Jamerson | Big Shoulders | Looking for his dad, a boy finds his father. |
| Barbara Kingsolver | Animal Dreams | Early Kingsolver |
| Barbara Kingsolver | Animal, Vegetable, Miracle | Recounts a year spent eating home-grown food and, if not that, local. |
| Jhumpa Lahiri | The Namesake | New arrivals from Calcutta try their best to become Americans. |
| Adam Langer | Crossing California | Chicago's West Rogers Park neighborhood in 1979 |
| Erik Larson | The Devil in the White City | Murder, magic, and madness at the World's Fair (non-fiction) |
| Jim Lynch | Highest Tide | A 13-yr old boy develops a consuming passion for tidal flats one summer. |
| William Maxwell | All the Days and Nights | 21 stories spanning 50 years of William Maxwell’s eloquence, grace and wit. |
| Elizabeth McCraken | The Giant's House | Unlikely love story between a lonely spinster librarian and a monstrous-sized younger man |
| Frank McCourt | Angela's Ashes | A memoir. |
| Jon Meachum | American Lion | Andrew Jackson in the White House. |
| Dinaw Mengestu | The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears | Debut novel about what it means to lose a family and a country through African immigrant's eyes. |
| Toni Morrison | The Bluest Eye | 1970 first Morrison novel. Oprah selection. |
| Toni Morrison | Beloved | Chosen by NYT Book Review fiction writers and reviewers as best American fiction in last 25 years. |
| Greg Mortenson | Three Cups of Tea | One man's quest to build schools in the wildest parts of Pakistan and Afghanistan. |
| Joyce Carol Oates | We Were the Mulvaneys | Dissolution of the American family—and an American way of life. Oprah selection. |
| Nuala O'Faolain | Are You Somebody? | The accidental memoirs of a Dublin woman. |
| Michael Pollan | The Botany of Desire | A plant's-eye view of the world. |
| Jonathan Raban | Passage To Juneau: a sea and its meanings. | Raban sails a 35 foot sailboat the thousand miles from Seattle to Juneau. The journey becomes a personal journey as well, as events in his own life impact his trip. |
| Marilynne Robinson | Gilead | Fathers and sons and the spiritual battles that still rage in America's heart. |
| Marilynne Robinson | Housekeeping | A book to read slowly and savor each word. Coming of age of a young orphan. |
| Julian Rubenstein | Ballad of the Whiskey Robber | True story of bank heists, ice hockey, Transylvanian pelt smuggling, moonlighting, detectives, and broken hearts. |
| Salman Rushdie | Midnight’s Children | Allegory for events in India before and after its 1947 independence and partition. Won Booker of Bookers in 1993. |
| Asne Seierstad | The Bookseller of Kabul | Reportage of Afghan after the Taliban |
| Aaron Stander | Color Tour | Second in Ray Elkins thrillers series |
| Peter Taylor | Summons to Memphis | Pulitzer Prize |
| Josephine Tey | The Franchise Affair | Inspector Grant has a cameo role in this classic in the detective field. |
| Jeffrey Toobin | The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court | New Yorker legal writer Toobin surveys the Court from the Reagan administration onward, as the justices wrestled with abortion, affirmative action, the death penalty, gay rights and church-state separation. |
| William Trevor | After Rain | Short stories by the author of Felicia’s Journey. |
| Adriana Trigiani | Big Stone Gap | Life story of self-proclaimed spinster Ave Maria Mulligan. |
| Brady Udall | The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint | A novel. |
| Barry Unsworth | Morality Play | Medieval murder mystery. |
| Larry Wakefield | The Way it Was: Stories from the Grand Traverse Area | In this collection of stories, historian Larry Wakefield, offers a short excursion into the amazing landscape of The Way It Was in the Grand Traverse Region. |
| Minette Walters | The Sculptress | Edgar award winning contemporary mystery writer – one of her best. |
| Edith Wharton | The Age of Innocence | Won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize. A story of desire and betrayal in Old New York. |
| Elie Wiesel | Night | Autobiographical account of Nazi death camp. Nobel Peace Prize. |
| Tobias Wolff | This Boy's Life | A Memoir |