Cloud Atlas

by David Mitchell

The narrators hear their echoes in history and change their destinies in ways great and small, in a study of humanity's dangerous will to power. A reluctant voyager crosses the Pacific in 1850. A disinherited composer gatecrashes in between-wars Belgium. A vanity publisher flees gangland creditors. Others are a journalist in Governor Reagan’s California, and genetically-modified dinery server on death-row. Finally, a young Pacific Islander witnesses the nightfall of science and civilization.

Life of Pi

by Yann Martel

Life of Pi is a fantasy adventure novel by Yann Martel published in 2001. The protagonist, Piscine Molitor "Pi" Patel, a Tamil boy from Pondicherry, explores issues of spirituality and practicality from an early age. He survives 227 days after a shipwreck while stranded on a boat in the Pacific Ocean with a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

by Jonathan Safran Foer

Oskar Schell is a detective, inventor, entomologist, Francophile, letter writer, pacifist, natural historian, percussionist, romantic, Great Explorer, jeweler, vegan, collector of butterflies, and nine. When his father is killed 11th September at the World Trade Centre, Oskar finds a key in his closet that leads into the lives of strangers, the five boroughs of New York, history, bombings of Dresden and Hiroshima, and on an inward journey toward peace.