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A God In Ruins Leon Uris Set between the 1940s and 2008, the book follows the life of Quinn Patrick O'Connell, the fictional Democratic candidate for the 2008 United States Presidency, his family, and the life of his opponent, Thornton Tomtree. The book climaxes with the election campaign and its results. 
Atonement Ian McEwan Atonement is a 2001 British metafiction novel written by Ian McEwan concerning the understanding of and responding to the need for personal atonement. Set in three time periods, 1935 England, Second World War England and France, and present-day England, it covers an upper-class girl's half-innocent mistake that ruins lives, her adulthood in the shadow of that mistake, and a reflection on the nature of writing. 
A Thousand Acres Jane Smiley Larry Cook is an aging farmer who decides to incorporate his farm, handing complete and joint ownership to his three daughters, Ginny, Rose, and Caroline. When the youngest daughter objects, she is removed from the agreement. This sets off a chain of events that brings dark truths to light and explodes long-suppressed emotions, as the story eventually reveals the long-term sexual abuse of the two eldest daughters that was committed by their father. 
The Cider House Rules John Irving Homer Wells grows up in an orphanage where he spends his childhood "being of use" as a medical assistant to the director, Dr. Wilbur Larch, whose history is told in flashbacks: After a traumatic misadventure with a prostitute as a young man, Wilbur turns his back on sex and love, choosing instead to help women with unwanted pregnancies give birth and then keeping the babies in an orphanage. He makes a point of maintaining an emotional distance from the orphans, so that they can more easily make the transition into an adoptive family, but when it becomes clear that Homer is going to spend his entire childhood at the orphanage, Wilbur trains the orphan as an obstetrician and then comes to love him like a son.
Wilbur's and Homer's lives are complicated by Wilbur also secretly being an abortionist. Wilbur came to this work reluctantly, but he is driven by having seen the horrors of back-alley operations. Homer, upon learning Wilbur's secret, considers it morally wrong. 
A Farewell To Arms Ernest Hemingway A Farewell to Arms is about a love affair between the expatriate American Frederic Henry and Catherine Barkley against the backdrop of the First World War, cynical soldiers, fighting and the displacement of populations. The publication of A Farewell to Arms cemented Hemingway's stature as a modern American writer, became his first best-seller, and is described by biographer Michael Reynolds as 'the premier American war novel from that debacle World War I. A Thousand Splendid Suns Khaled Hosseini The novel centers on two women, Mariam and Laila, how their lives become intertwined after a series of drastic events, and their subsequent friendship and support for each other in the backdrop of Kabul in the 20th and 21st century. It is split into four parts that focus on individual stories: Part one is about Mariam, part two is on Laila, part three is on the relationship between the two women, and Laila's life with Tariq is in part four. The last section also happens to be the only part written in the present tense. 
Anna Karenina Leo Tolstoy Widely regarded as a pinnacle in realist fiction, Tolstoy considered Anna Karenina his first true novel, after he came to consider War and Peace to be more than a novel. Fyodor Dostoyevsky declared it 'flawless as a work of art.' His opinion was shared by Vladimir Nabokov, who especially admired 'the flawless magic of Tolstoy's style,' and by William Faulkner, who described the novel as 'the best ever written.' The novel remains popular, as demonstrated by a 2007 Time poll of 125 contemporary authors in which Anna Kareninawas voted the 'greatest book ever written. " "