Orphan Train
by Christina Baker Kline | 
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
by Michael Chabon | 
The Invention of Wings
by Sue Monk Kidd | 
Year of Wonders
by Geraldine Brooks | 
The Storyteller
by Jodi Picoult | 
Viking Tales
by Jennie Hall | 
Let the Great World Spin
by Colum McCann | 
The Autobiography of Henry VIII
by Margaret George | 
Sarum
by Edward Rutherfurd | 
Rules of Civility
by Amor Towles | 
One Thousand White Women
by Jim Fergus | 
The Lacuna
by Barbara Kingsolver | 
The Marriage of Opposites
by Alice Hoffman | 
London
by Edward Rutherfurd | 
Of Love and Other Demons
by Gabriel Garcia Marquez | 
The Son
by Philipp Meyer | 
Remarkable Creatures
by Tracy Chevalier | 
The Memoirs of Cleopatra
by Margaret George | 
Tall Chimneys
by Allie Cresswell | 
Any Human Heart
by William Boyd |
She has hair of ginger and lovely green eyes, and she has just been transported with her family from Terezin to Auschwitz. In short order, her father commits suicide, and her mother and younger brother are dispatched to the gas chambers, but 15 year old Hanka Kaudersova is still alive. Faced with the choice of certain death in the camp or working in a German military brothel on the eastern front, she chooses a chance at life. Passing as an Aryan, Hanka's days in the brothel are full of cold and hunger, fear and shame. She is sustained by her loathing of the men who visit her and by a fierce, indomitable will to live. This devastatingly beautiful novel soars beyond the nightmare to leave the reader with a transcendent sense of hope.