Book: Say You're One of Them

Title: Say You're One of Them
Author: Uwem Akpan
Published: 2008
Category: Adult Fiction
Genre: Short Stories, family/personal drama
Pages: 358
Summary on Goodreads: Each story in this jubilantly acclaimed collection pays testament to the wisdom and resilience of children, even in the face of the most agonizing circumstances.

A family living in a makeshift shanty in urban Kenya scurries to find gifts of any kind for the impending Christmas holiday. A Rwandan girl relates her family's struggles to maintain a facade of normalcy amid unspeakable acts. A young brother and sister cope with their uncle's attempt to sell them into slavery. Aboard a bus filled with refugees—a microcosm of today's Africa—a Muslim boy summons his faith to bear a treacherous ride across Nigeria. Through the eyes of childhood friends the emotional toll of religious conflict in Ethiopia becomes viscerally clear.

Awards: Guardian First Book Award Nominee, Dayton Literary peace-prize for fiction runner up, PEN Open Book Award, Paris Book Festival for Compilation/Anthology, Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Fiction, Commonwealth Writer's Prize for Best Fiction in Africa, also was an Oprah Book club selection.

Series: Wolves Chronicles

Series: The Wolves Chronicles
Books in Order: The Wolves of Willoughby Chase
Blackhearts in Battersea
Nightbirds on Nantucket
The Stolen Lake
Dangerous Games
The Cuckoo Tree
Didi and Pa
Is Underground
Cold Shoulder Road
Midwinter Nightingale
The Witch of Clatteringshaws
Author: Joan Aiken
Started: 1962
Summary of first book on Goodreads: Wicked wolves and a grim governess threaten Bonnie and her cousin Sylvia when Bonnie's parents leave Willoughby Chase for a sea voyage. Left in the care of the cruel Miss Slighcarp, the girls can hardly believe what is happening to their once happy home. The servants are dismissed, the furniture is sold, and Bonnie and Sylvia are sent to a prison-like orphan school. It seems as if the endless hours of drudgery will never cease.

With the help of Simon the gooseboy and his flock, they escape. But how will they ever get Willoughby Chase free from the clutches of the evil Miss Slighcarp? 

Note: this author has written several other books for children/YA/and adults. This is probably her most popular series though.

Book: Throne of the Crescent Moon

Title: Throne of the Crescent Moon
Book 1 in a series (2nd due out next year)
Author: Saladin Ahmed
Published: 2012
Category: Adult Fiction
Genre: Fantasy/adventure
Pages: 274
Summary on Goodreads: The Crescent Moon Kingdoms, home to djenn and ghuls, holy warriors and heretics, are at the boiling point of a power struggle between the iron-fisted Khalif and the mysterious master thief known as the Falcon Prince. In the midst of this brewing rebellion a series of brutal supernatural murders strikes at the heart of the Kingdoms. It is up to a handful of heroes to learn the truth behind these killings.

Doctor Adoulla Makhslood, “the last real ghul hunter in the great city of Dhamsawaat,” just wants a quiet cup of tea. Three score and more years old, he has grown weary of hunting monsters and saving lives, and is more than ready to retire from his dangerous and demanding vocation. But when an old flame’s family is murdered, Adoulla is drawn back to the hunter’s path.

Raseed bas Raseed, Adoulla’s young assistant, is a hidebound holy warrior whose prowess is matched only by his piety. But even as Raseed’s sword is tested by ghuls and manjackals, his soul is tested when he and Adoulla cross paths with the tribeswoman Zamia.

Zamia Badawi, Protector of the Band, has been gifted with the near-mythical power of the lion-shape, but shunned by her people for daring to take up a man’s title. She lives only to avenge her father’s death. Until she learns that Adoulla and his allies also hunt her father’s killer. Until she meets Raseed.

When they learn that the murders and the Falcon Prince’s brewing revolution are connected, the companions must race against time—and struggle against their own misgivings—to save the life of a vicious despot. In so doing they discover a plot for the Throne of the Crescent Moon that threatens to turn Dhamsawaat, and the world itself, into a blood-soaked ruin.

Awards: Hugo nominee, Nebula nominee, Locus Award for Best New Novel

Author: Cecelia Ahern

Name: Cecelia Ahern

Category: Adult Fiction

Genre: Contemporary Romance/Drama

List of books: P.S. I Love You (her most well known, was made into a movie)

Love, Rosie (was just made into a movie that's coming soon)

If You Could See Me Now

A Place Called Here

Thanks for the Memories

The Gift

The Book of Tomorrow

The Time of My Life

One Hundred Names

How to Fall in Love

Girl in the Mirror

The Year I Met You 

Author: Ann Aguirre

Name: Ann Aguirre

Category: Adult Fiction and YA

Genre: Sci-fi/Dystopian/Urban Fantasy/Mystery/Paranormal/Romance

Major series: Sirantha Jax series, 6 books/complete (sci-fi)

Dred Chronicles series, 3 books so far/spin-off of Sirantha Jax (sci-fi)

Corine Solomon (urban fantasy/mystery)

2B Trilogy (contemporary romance)

Razorland Trilogy (YA dystopian)

Immortal Game Trilogy (YA urban fantasy, last book due next year)

Book: The Complete Fables

Title: The Complete Fables
Author: Aesop
Published: this particular addition was published in 1979, but the fables have been around for hundreds of years.
Category: Classics
Genre: fables/fantasy/mythology
Pages: 262
Summary on Goodreads: This is the first translation ever to make available the complete corpus of 358 fables. Aesop was probably a prisoner of war, sold into slavery in the early sixth century BCE, who represented his masters in court and negotiations and relied on animal stories to put across his key points. Such fables vividly reveal the strange superstitions of ordinary ancient Greeks, how they treated their pets, how they spoilt their sons and even what they kept in their larders. As these stories became well-known, 'Aesopic' one-liners were widely quoted at drinking-parties, and the collection eventually came to include more satirical tales of alien creatures - apes, camels, lions and elephants - which presumably originate in Libya and Egypt. All have now been brought together in this definitive and fully annotated modern edition.

Notes: there are several versions of these tales available, as well as different versions of any classic I put on here. I'm going by the Penguin classics because they'll be the most widely available and are usually the best versions you can get. 

Book: Speedboat

Title: Speedboat
Author: Renata Adler
Published: 1976
Category: Adult Fiction
Genre: Realistic Fiction/drama/literature
Pages: 177
Summary on Goodreads: When Speedboat burst on the scene in the late ’70s it was like nothing readers had encountered before. It seemed to disregard the rules of the novel, but it wore its unconventionality with ease. Reading it was a pleasure of a new, unexpected kind. Above all, there was its voice, ambivalent, curious, wry, the voice of Jen Fain, a journalist negotiating the fraught landscape of contemporary urban America. Party guests, taxi drivers, brownstone dwellers, professors, journalists, presidents, and debutantes fill these dispatches from the world as Jen finds it. 

Series: Department Q

Series: Department Q
Order of Books: The Keeper of Lost Causes
The Absent One
A Conspiracy of Faith
The Purity of Vengeance
The Marco Effect
The Hanging Girl (being released in English in September 2015)
Author: Jussi Adler-Olsen
Started: 2007
Category: Adult Fiction
Genre: Mystery/Police Procedural
Summary of first book on Goodreads: Carl Mørck used to be one of Copenhagen’s best homicide detectives. Then a hail of bullets destroyed the lives of two fellow cops, and Carl—who didn’t draw his weapon—blames himself. So a promotion is the last thing he expects. But Department Q is a department of one, and Carl’s got only a stack of Copenhagen’s coldest cases for company. His colleagues snicker, but Carl may have the last laugh, because one file keeps nagging at him: a liberal politician vanished five years earlier and is presumed dead. But she isn’t dead … yet. 

Author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

   

Name: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Category: Adult Fiction

Genre: Realistic Fiction/Drama

Major Fiction Books: Purple Hibiscus

Half of a Yellow Sun

Americanah

Note: The author also has a collection of essays out called The Thing Around Your Neck and a essay out called We Should All be Feminists that everyone should read. 

Book: Watership Down

Title: Watership Down
Author: Richard Adams
Published: 1972
Category: Eh...jury seems to be out. I've seen it classified as adult, ya, AND childrens. I'm going to go ahead and put it under adult fiction because I don't think there are any teenagers in here and that's how I usually see bookstores categorize it.
Genre: Animal Fiction, Fantasy, Adventure
Pages: 478
Summary on Goodreads: A phenomenal worldwide bestseller for over thirty years, Richard Adams's Watership Down is a timeless classic and one of the most beloved novels of all time. Set in England's Downs, a once idyllic rural landscape, this stirring tale of adventure, courage and survival follows a band of very special creatures on their flight from the intrusion of man and the certain destruction of their home. Led by a stouthearted pair of friends, they journey forth from their native Sandleford Warren through the harrowing trials posed by predators and adversaries, to a mysterious promised land and a more perfect society. 

Note: There is a companion book to this called Tales from Watership Down.

Series: Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Series: Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Order of books: The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Life, the Universe, and Everything
So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
Mostly Harmless
Author: Douglas Adams
Started: 1979
Category: Adult Fiction
Genre: Science Fiction/Parody-Humor-Satire
Summary on Goodreads of the first book: Seconds before the Earth is demolished to make way for a galactic freeway, Arthur Dent is plucked off the planet by his friend Ford Prefect, a researcher for the revised edition of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy who, for the last fifteen years, has been posing as an out-of-work actor.

Together this dynamic pair begin a journey through space aided by quotes from The Hitchhiker's Guide ("A towel is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have") and a galaxy-full of fellow travelers: Zaphod Beeblebrox--the two-headed, three-armed ex-hippie and totally out-to-lunch president of the galaxy; Trillian, Zaphod's girlfriend (formally Tricia McMillan), whom Arthur tried to pick up at a cocktail party once upon a time zone; Marvin, a paranoid, brilliant, and chronically depressed robot; Veet Voojagig, a former graduate student who is obsessed with the disappearance of all the ballpoint pens he bought over the years.

Note: The author has two other series: Dirk Gently and the Meaning of Liff, which also fall under this genre.

Series: The African Trilogy

Series: The African Trilogy
Order of Books: Things Fall Apart
No Longer at Ease
Arrow of God
Author: Chinua Achebe
Published: started in 1958
Category: Adult Fiction
Genre: Historical Fiction/literature
Summary of the first book on Goodreads: THINGS FALL APART tells two overlapping, intertwining stories, both of which center around Okonkwo, a “strong man” of an Ibo village in Nigeria. The first of these stories traces Okonkwo's fall from grace with the tribal world in which he lives, and in its classical purity of line and economical beauty it provides us with a powerful fable about the immemorial conflict between the individual and society. 

The second story, which is as modern as the first is ancient, and which elevates the book to a tragic plane, concerns the clash of cultures and the destruction of Okonkwo's world through the arrival of aggressive, proselytizing European missionaries. These twin dramas are perfectly harmonized, and they are modulated by an awareness capable of encompassing at once the life of nature, human history, and the mysterious compulsions of the soul. THINGS FALL APART is the most illuminating and permanent monument we have to the modern African experience as seen from within.

Note: this author has written several books, but this trilogy is what he's best known for and probably what you'll get recommended the most.

Author: Joe Abercrombie

                                  
                                                

Name: Joe Abercrombie

Category: Adult fiction and YA

Genre: Fantasy

Major Series: The First Law series (complete) (adult)
The Shattered Sea Trilogy (on going, the third book is coming in July) (YA)

Author: Shana Abe

                                              

Name: Shana Abe

Category: Adult fiction, one YA spin-off series

Genre: Paranormal Romance/Romance

List of Books/Series: Drakon series (5 books, complete)

The Sweetest Dark series (2 books so far, one more coming)

The Promise of Rain

A Rose in Winter

The Truelove Bride

A Kiss at Midnight

Intimate Enemies

The Secret Swan

The Last Mermaid

Book: The Woman in the Dunes

Title: The Woman in the Dunes
Author: Kobo Abe
Published: 1962
Category: Adult Fiction/Modern Classic
Genre: Magical Realism/literature
Pages: 256
Summary on Goodreads: After missing the last bus home following a day trip to the seashore, an amateur entomologist is offered lodging for the night at the bottom of a vast sand pit. But when he attempts to leave the next morning, he quickly discovers that the locals have other plans. Held captive with seemingly no chance of escape, he is tasked with shoveling back the ever-advancing sand dunes that threaten to destroy the village. His only companion is an odd young woman. Together their fates become intertwined as they work side by side at this Sisyphean task.