The Master and Margarita

White Teeth Zadie Smith

Two London families -- one Bangladeshi, one English -- span three generations, two world wars, and enough cultural collision to fill an encyclopedia. Zadie Smith's first novel, written at 21.

White Noise Don DeLillo

A professor of Hitler Studies and his family navigate American consumer culture, a toxic cloud event, and the fear of death -- in that order.

A Confederacy of Dunces John Kennedy Toole

Ignatius J. Reilly is the most magnificently insufferable protagonist in American comic fiction -- and somehow, the novel earns every page of him.

Everything Is Illuminated Jonathan Safran Foer

A young Jewish-American writer travels to Ukraine to find the woman who saved his grandfather during the Holocaust, accompanied by a translator whose English is spectacularly wrong.

The Underground Railroad Colson Whitehead

A slave escapes a Georgia plantation via a literal underground railroad -- a network of secret tunnels running beneath the American South -- and discovers that freedom is not a single destination.