Tom Rob Smith, Zadie Smith, Muriel Spark and John Steinbeck
Child 44 - Tom Rob Smith
Under Stalin's terrifying regime, families live in fear. When the all-powerful State claims there is no such thing as crime, who dares disagree? An ambitious secret police officer, Leo Demidov believes he's helping to build the perfect society.
But when he uncovers evidence of a killer at large - a threat the state won't admit exists - Demidov must risk everything, including the lives of those he loves, in order to expose the truth.
On Beauty - Zadie Smith
Set between New England and London, On Beauty concerns a pair of feuding families - the Belseys and the Kipps - and a clutch of doomed affairs. It puts low morals among high ideals and asks some searching questions about what life does to love.
For the Belseys and the Kipps, the confusions - both personal and political - of our uncertain age are about to be brought close to home: right to the heart of family.
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie - Muriel Spark
Miss Jean Brodie is a schoolmistress with a difference. She is proud, cultured and romantic but her educational ideas are highly progressive and even deeply shocking.
So when she decides to transform a group of 'special girls' into the crème de la crème at Marcia Blaine School they are soon known, perhaps suspiciously, as the Brodie set.
The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
Shocking and controversial when it was first published, The Grapes of Wrath is Steinbeck's Pultizer Prize-winning epic of the Joad family, forced to travel west from Dust Bowl era Oklahoma in search of the promised land of California.
Their story is one of false hopes, thwarted desires and powerlessness, yet out of their struggle Steinbeck created a drama that is both intensely human and majestic in its scale and moral vision.