Everything we read about in City of God-from the Episcopal priest in the throes of a crisis of faith and the bereaved rabbi endeavoring to redirect the destiny of the entire Jewish tradition, to a Holocaust survivor's harrowing ghetto narrative and the pair of lushly imagistic verse poems about the World Wars-presumably flows from a single, blinking computer cursor that is manipulated by a middle-aged New York novelist named Everett. With Everett as his protagonist and millennially harried Everyman, Doctorow takes readers on a sweeping survey of the twentieth century, channeling the voices of Albert Einstein, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Frank Sinatra, as well as the voices of Everett's fellow fictional beings, who occupy the novel's principal narrative.

Ignatius's ire explodes when his mother backs her car into another automobile. The owner of the damaged vehicle insists on payment; Mrs. Reilly demands that her son cease watching television and writing in his Big Chief tablet and get a job.

Released by Louisiana State University Press in April 1980, A Confederacy of Dunces is nothing short of a publishing phenomenon. Turned down by countless publishers and submitted by the author's mother years after his suicide, the book won the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Today there are almost two million copies in print worldwide in eighteen languages.

He relates well to animals but has no understanding of human emotions. He cannot stand to be touched. And he detests the color yellow. This improbable story of Christopher's quest to investigate the suspicious death of a neighborhood dog makes for one of the most captivating, unusual, and widely heralded novels in recent years.

Accompanied by an old man haunted by memories of the war, an amorous dog named Sammy Davis, Junior, Junior, and the unforgettable Alex, a young Ukrainian translator who speaks in a sublimely butchered English, Jonathan is led on a quixotic journey over a devastated landscape and into an unexpected past.

An arresting blend of high comedy and great tragedy, this is a story about searching for people and places that no longer exist, for the hidden truths that haunt every family, and for the delicate but necessary tales that link past and future. Exuberant and wise, hysterically funny and deeply moving, Everything is Illuminated is an astonishing debut.

The specific setting is Birmingham, Alabama, a locus of the civil rights struggle now erupting into flames. The author's note appended to the novel acknowledges Naslund's desire to write about the "acts of courage and tragedy" that marked daily life in Birmingham during these fractious but course-altering years; her method is to mix fictional characters with real ones to give alternating perspectives on the events that transpired.

Gender, race, and racial attitudes span the spectrum as Naslund embeds personal stories--individuals' needs, goals, and frustrations--within the overall context of the country's changing climate. The ultimate effect is not a patchwork of tales but a smoothly flowing composite narrative of how life was led at the time and how it was irreparably altered. A vivid picture, rendered on a large but focused screen.

Carson McCullers at her most compassionate, endearing best in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter with its profound sense of moral isolation and its compassionate glimpses into its characters' inner lives. At its center is the deaf-mute John Singer, who becomes the confidant for various types of misfits in a Georgia mill town during the 1930s. Each one yearns for escape from small town life. When Singer's mute companion goes insane, Singer moves into the Kelly house, where Mick Kelly, the book's heroine (and loosely based on McCullers), finds solace in her music.

The unforgettable, heartbreaking story of the unlikely friendship between a wealthy boy and the son of his father's servant, The Kite Runner is a beautifully crafted novel set in a country that is in the process of being destroyed. It is about the power of reading, the price of betrayal, and the possibility of redemption, and it is also about the power of fathers over sons-their love, their sacrifices, their lies.

Ken Kesey's One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest (Viking, 1962) seems an apt comparison for this work-Frey maintains his principles and does not respect authority at all if it doesn't follow his beliefs. And fellow addicts are as much, if not more, help to him than the clinicians who are trying to preach the 12 steps, which he does not intend to follow in his path to sobriety. Anger, hurt, love, and pain are all laid bare; his writing style is as naked and forthright as the raw emotions that life in the rehab center brings to the surface.

Lionel Essrog is Brooklyn's very own self-appointed Human Freakshow, an orphan whose Tourettic impulses drive him to bark, count, and rip apart our language in startling and original ways. Together with three veterans of the St. Vincent's Home for Boys, he works for small-time mobster Frank Minna's limo service cum detective agency. Life without Frank Minna, the charismatic King of Brooklyn, would be unimaginable, so who cares if the tasks he sets them are, well, not exactly legal. But when Frank is fatally stabbed, one of Lionel's colleagues lands in jail, the other two vie for his position, and the victim's widow skips town. Lionel's world is suddenly topsy-turvy, and this outcast who has trouble even conversing attempts to untangle the threads of the case while trying to keep the words straight in his head. Motherless Brooklyn is a brilliantly original homage to the classic detective novel by one of the most acclaimed writers of his generation.

Is it morally correct to do whatever it takes to save a child's life, even if that means infringing upon the rights of another? conceived to provide a bone marrow match for her leukemia-stricken sister, teenage Kate begins to question her moral obligations in light of countless medical procedures and decides to fight for the right to make decisions about her own body. My Sister's Keeper examines what it means to be a good parent, a good sister, a good person.

The year is 1886, and the British Empire is attempting to tighten its control of its colonies in the Far East, to fend off French rivals in the Mekong Delta, and to quell the resistance of a confederacy of local Shan tribes in northern Burma.

Written in a prose capable of both historical precision and mystical lushness, The Piano Tuner explores British colonialism at a moment of crisis and the ill fortune of a man who confuses "the cause of music" with the cause of empire.

Now this compelling novel animates the legend with a portrait of an unforgettable woman who struggles against restrictions her soul cannot accept. When her older brother dies in a Viking attack, the brilliant young Joan assumes his identity and enters a Benedictine monastery where, as Brother John Anglicus, she distinguishes herself as a scholar and healer. Eventually drawn to Rome, she soon becomes enmeshed in a dangerous mix of powerful passion and explosive politics that threatens her life even as it elevates her to the highest throne in the Western world.

They were all former students whom she had taught at university. Some came from conservative and religious families, others were progressive and secular; several had spent time in jail. They were shy and uncomfortable at first, unaccustomed to being asked to speak their minds, but soon they began to open up and to speak more freely, not only about the novels they were reading but also about themselves, their dreams and disappointments. Their stories intertwined with those they were reading-Pride and Prejudice, Washington Square, Daisy Miller and Lolita-their Lolita, as they imagined her in Tehran.

Based on actual historical events, One Thousand White Women is the poignant story of May Dodd's journey west. Committed to an insane asylum by her blueblood family for an affair with a man beneath her station, May finds that her only hope of freedom is to participate in a secret government program whereby women from the "civilized" world become the brides of Cheyenne warriors. She soon falls in love with John Bourke, a gallant young army captain, even though she is married to the great chief Little Wolf. Caught between two worlds and two men, Dodd is forced to make tough decisions that will change her life forever.

Jammana, who possesses an ancestral gift that allows her to see the past, travels with her mother, Rafa, against her father's wishes, to Rafa's birthplace, the ancient village of Ein Fadr. It is 1966, and the desert region simmers with ethnic and religious tensions helicopters and military patrols are as much a part of the terrain as sand dunes and camels. The prose is simple but elegant, and subtle interweaving of the mystical and the mundane makes the novel delightfully compelling.

But her grandmother, who has raised her from birth, arranges Janie's marriage to an older local farmer. So begins Janie's journey toward herself and toward the farthest horizon open to her. Zora Neale Hurston's classic 1937 novel follows Janie from her Nanny's plantation shack, to Logan Killicks's farm, to all-black Eatonville, to the Everglades, and back to Eatonville--where she gathers in "the great fish-net" of her life.

Eva Khatchadourian dissects her married life and her mothering of her son Kevin and daughter Celia in the aftermath of Kevin's Columbine-like school slaying of seven classmates, a cafeteria worker, and a teacher. Worried that her son's murderousness might have resulted from her deficits as a mother, Eva probes the most intimate and shocking aspects of her inner life, her marriage and her resentment of motherhood. This literary page-turner tackles the sensitive proposition that mothers can be unmoved by -- and even dislike -- their own children.

Born in England in 1902, Markham was taken by her father to East Africa in 1906. She spent her childhood playing with native Maruni children and apprenticing with her father as a trainer and breeder of racehorses. In the 1930s, she became an African bush pilot, and in September 1936, became the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic from east to west.

In The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan argues that the answer lies at the heart of the intimately reciprocal relationship between people and plants. In telling the stories of four familiar plant species that are deeply woven into the fabric of our lives, Pollan illustrates how they evolved to satisfy humankinds's most basic yearnings — and by doing so made themselves indispensable. For, just as we've benefited from these plants, the plants, in the grand co-evolutionary scheme that Pollan evokes so brilliantly, have done well by us. The sweetness of apples, for example, induced the early Americans to spread the species, giving the tree a whole new continent in which to blossom. So who is really domesticating whom?

Weaving fascinating anecdotes and accessible science into gorgeous prose, Pollan takes us on an absorbing journey that will change the way we think about our place in nature.

Despite some wonderful passages, however, the narrative thrust consists of self-contained vignettes that do not easily lend themselves to audio. The histories of these women are intense and distinctive, but the superficial present in which they do little more than move from restaurant to restaurant blurs them to the point of being interchangeable. When she stays with one character long enough (e.g., her treatment of Charis's incest-filled childhood at the start of the third tape), the poignancy increases. It's slow going, but a lively reading by Blythe Danner and musical interludes that accentuate the New Age mood should help keep maintain listeners' attention.

Though Daniel's copy of Carax's novel is the last in existence, he's unwilling to part with it at any price and dedicates himself to revealing the truth about Carax. Aided in his quest by the good-humored Fermín Romero de Torres, a former beggar whose "difficult life-lessons" enable him to keep a step ahead of trouble, Daniel begins to uncover a tale of murder, madness, and secrets that might best be forgotten. And as he wends his way through Barcelona society, both high and low, he comes to realize that his own part in The Shadow of the Wind is more than that of a mere reader.

Mende Nazer's "beautiful and at times heart-wrenching "account of her struggle to survive modern-day slavery (The Washington Post)

Author Biography: Mende Nazer is approximately twenty-five years old (the Nuba do not record exact dates of birth). She was granted political asylum by the British government in 2003. She currently lives in London. Damien Lewis is a British journalist who helped Mende escape and transcribed her story. A Sudan expert, he is an anti-slavery activist.