F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic novel of excess and disaffection in the roaring 1920s follows narrator Nick Carraway through the world of West Egg, N.Y., where the mysterious Jay Gatsby throws extravagant parties.

On a rocky patch of Italian coastline, circa 1962, a daydreaming young innkeeper has an almost-love affair with a beautiful American starlet. She draws him into her glittering world, from the lavish set of Cleopatra to the shabby revelry of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival to the back lots of contemporary Hollywood, and both begin to cling to an improbable dream.

Bee Fox is a nice kid, a good musician and a great student. But her mother, Bernadette, is notorious. To her Microsoft-guru husband, she's a fearlessly opinionated partner; to fellow private-school mothers in Seattle, she's a disgrace; to design mavens, she's a revolutionary architect. Then, Bernadette goes missing, and Bee begins a search that will take her to the ends of the earth.

Pak Jun Do, the son of an influential father who runs an orphan work camp, rises to prominence using instinctive talents and eventually becomes a professional kidnapper and romantic rival to Kim Jong Il.

The spark has gone out of Henry VIII's second marriage. When his roving eye leaves Anne Boleyn and begins to settle on Jane Seymour, another woman at court, the monarch turns to his chief adviser, Thomas Cromwell, for help. Hilary Mantel's Bring Up the Bodies is the second book in a planned trilogy about Cromwell.

After Tom moves his young bride to an isolated lighthouse home on Australia's Janus Rock, the couple suffers miscarriages and a stillbirth. Tom allows his wife to claim an infant who has washed up on the shore, only to witness a rift in their marriage that is further complicated by a search by the baby's desperate mother.

An artist whose reputation has been tarnished stumbles on a piece of art that disappeared 25 years ago and agrees to forge it for a gallery owner. But then she realizes that the art she is forging may itself be a forgery.

When two skittish pregnant girls appear on his homestead, solitary orchardist Talmadge — who carefully tends the grove of fruit trees he has cultivated for nearly half a century — vows to save and protect them. The Orchardist evokes a powerful sense of place in the American West, mixing tenderness and violence as Talmadge tries to reconcile the ghosts of his own troubled past and faces the dramatic consequences of his actions.

In Al Tafar, Iraq, 21-year-old Pvt. John Bartle and 18-year-old Pvt. Daniel Murphy cling to life as their platoon launches a bloody battle for the city. The two men do all they can to protect each other from the forces that are pressing in: the insurgents, physical fatigue and the mental stress that comes from constant danger. As reality begins to blur into a hazy nightmare, Murphy becomes increasingly unmoored from the world around him and Bartle takes actions he could never have imagined.

Victoria, the orphaned heroine of Vanessa Diffenbaugh's debut novel, is privy to a secret language of flowers that dates to Victorian England.

In the aftermath of a brutal attack that left a woman in intensive care and her husband and young children dead, brash cop Scorcher Kennedy and his rookie partner, Richie, struggle with perplexing clues and Scorcher's haunting memories of a shattering incident from his childhood.

The Paris Wife follows the life of Ernest Hemingway's first wife, Hadley, as she navigates 1920s Paris.

After surviving the pandemic disease that killed everyone he knows, a pilot establishes a shelter in an abandoned airport hangar. But when he hears a random radio transmission, he's compelled to risk his life to seek out other survivors.

For recently retired Harold Fry, little differentiates one day from the next. Then one morning a letter arrives from a woman he hasn't heard from in 20 years: Queenie Hennessy is in hospice and is writing to say goodbye. With no warning or planning, Harold heads to Queenie's bedside, walking all the way from the very southernmost part of England to the very northernmost part.

Assuming the power recently lost by the disgraced Cardinal Wolsey, Thomas Cromwell counsels a mercurial Henry VIII on the latter's efforts to marry Anne Boleyn against the wishes of Rome, a successful endeavor that comes with a dangerous price.