If you like Cormac McCarthy, try....The killings of Stanley Ketchel / James Carlos Blake: A tale inspired by the career of ragtime-era middleweight boxing champion Stanley Ketchel traces the athlete's meteoric rise against a backdrop of the violence and tragedy that marked his short life. Steeped in the sweat and blood of the life of a legend, The Killings of Stanley Ketchel is a sweeping and powerful literary adventure by one of our most daring novelists.

If you like Don DeLillo, try....My revolutions / Hari Kunzru.: Having briefly worked as a terrorist to protest the Vietnam War, Chris Carver hides his past from his suburban family and friends before a ghost from his past forces him to flee, a circumstance during which he remembers violent relationships with two fellow radicals.

If you like Toni Morrison, try....Daughter of fortune : a novel / Isabel Allende: Raised in the British colony of Valparaiso, Chile, after being abandoned as a baby, a pregnant Eliza follows her lover, Joaquin Andieta, to California at the height of the Gold Rush and finds adventure and adversity on her road to independence and love. Daughter of Fortune is a sweeping portrait of an era, a story rich in character, history, violence, and compassion. In Eliza, Allende has created one of her most appealing heroines, an adventurous, independent-minded, and highly unconventional young woman who has the courage to reinvent herself and to create her own destiny in a new country. A marvel of storytelling, Daughter of Fortune confirms once again Isabel Allende's extraordinary gift for fiction and her place as one of the world's leading writers.

If you like William Faulkner, try....The brief wondrous life of Oscar Wao / Junot Díaz: Living with an Old World mother and rebellious sister, an urban New Jersey misfit dreams of becoming the next J.R.R. Tolkien and believes that a longstanding family curse is thwarting his efforts to find love and happiness.

If you like Julio Cortazar, try....Invisible cities / Italo Calvino: In Kublai Khan's garden, at sunset, the young Marco Polo diverts the aged emperor from his obsession with the impending end of his empire with tales of countless cities past, present, and future.

If you like Roberto Bolano, try....Blindness / José Saramago: A city is hit by an epidemic of "white blindness" which spares no one. Authorities confine the blind to an empty mental hospital, but there the criminal element holds everyone captive, stealing food rations and raping women. There is one eyewitness to this nightmare who guides seven strangers-among them a boy with no mother, a girl with dark glasses, a dog of tears-through the barren streets, and the procession becomes as uncanny as the surroundings are harrowing. A magnificent parable of loss and disorientation and a vivid evocation of the horrors of the twentieth century, Blindness has swept the reading public with its powerful portrayal of man's worst appetites and weaknesses-and man's ultimately exhilarating spirit. The stunningly powerful novel of man's will to survive against all odds, by the winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize for Literature.

If you like Flannery O'Connor, try....Serena : a novel / Ron Rash: Traveling to the mountains of 1929 North Carolina to forge a timber business with her new husband, Serena Pemberton champions her mastery of harsh natural and working conditions but turns murderous when she learns she cannot bear children. Rash's masterful balance of violence and beauty yields a riveting novel that, at its core, tells of love both honored and betrayed.