 | Atonement by Ian McEwan
Buy used from: $0.01 McEwan's most well-known novel has a deserved reputation. It deals with topics of class, war, and love with a masterful narrative style, winding together the stories of the characters' lives in a profound way.
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 | Saturday by Ian McEwan
Buy new: $10.17 / Used from: $0.01 This is a timely novel that takes place over the length of a day, focusing both on the mundane everyday events in the life of a surgeon and the more unusual happenings when he has a run-in with some dangerous men. The backdrop of the story is a London protest of the Iraq war, but what one takes away from it is the depth of familial relationships and the strength found in a horrifying experience.
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 | On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan
Buy new: $10.04 / Used from: $0.01 McEwan's most recent novel is short, but infinitely relatable. The story revolves around a young couple's wedding night in the 1960s and the painful disconnect between the two parties' expectations and feelings about sex. Though the scene is very much set in the time, there is also a strong narrative awareness and a connection to our own era.
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 | The Line of Beauty: A Novel by Alan Hollinghurst
Buy new: $10.85 / Used from: $0.01 This is one of the best-written literary novels I have read. It is the coming-of-age story of a young gay man in 1980s England, inserting himself in the family life of the upper crust, and much of the novel centres on AIDS, class, and sex in the decade. The sex scenes, sometimes crude and always unapologetically straightfoward, blend effortlessly into the fabric of the narrative.
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 | The Master: A Novel by Colm Toibin
Buy new: $10.80 / Used from: $0.01 This invokation of Henry James can be frustrating, especially for those who were looking for a gay novel, but it is beautifully lyrical and a masterful representation of its time.
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 | Russian Debutante's Handbook by Gary Shteyngart
Buy new: $10.20 / Used from: $0.01 This is a fun and quirky postmodern novel that plays with the immigrant experience in a delightful manner.
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 | Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
Buy used from: $5.35 Foer's first novel is fabulously fun, disjointed and at the same time deeply evocative of the Jewish experience in Europe. Blending an absurd history with humorous cultural misunderstandings between a Ukranian and an American young man, the novel at the same time manages to tell the deeply serious story of an older man's personal history revolving around the Holocaust.
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 | The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer
Buy new: $14.96 / Used from: $5.57 I was enchanted by this new novel, written entirely in letters, that focuses on one woman's search for a book idea and the world she discovers on the island of Guernsey following the war and occupation. I'm not a big fan of war novels, but this novel is focused very strongly on the human angle and the characters really come alive.
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