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Vote for the best book of the decade

In association with Good Housekeeping, here at Lovereading we have compiled an all-important ‘Top 50 Books of the Last Decade’. There are numerous prize winners, occasional debut novels as well as novels that have now been made into films, but rest assured we think each and every one is, in its own unique way, a fantastic read and a book that will stand the test of time.


And we want your help in choosing the Top 10 books of the decade. It’s very easy – to put your favourites into the Top 10 just click the ‘Vote for Book’ button below each title.

You can vote for as many books as you wish — but only one vote will be counted per book.

The shortlist will be published on the website in April 2010. Thank you for your help.


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A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian
Marina Lewycka
'Two years after my mother died, my father fell in love with a glamourous blonde Ukrainian divorcee. He was eighty-four and she was thirty-six. She exploded into our lives like a fluffy pink grenade,...
 

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American Wife
Curtis Sittenfeld
In the year 2000, in the closest election in American history, Alice Blackwell's husband becomes president of the United States. Their time in the White House proves to be heady, tumultuous, and...
 

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Atonement
Ian McEwan
On the hottest day of the summer of 1934, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis sees her sister Cecilia strip off her clothes and plunge into the fountain in the garden of their country house. Watching her...
 

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Body Surfing
Anita Shreve
At the age of twenty-nine, Sydney has already been once divorced and once widowed. Trying to find her footing again, she has answered an advertisement to tutor the teenage daughter of a well-to-do...
 

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Brick Lane
Monica Ali
Still in her teenage years, Nazneen finds herself in an arranged marriage with a disappointed man who is twenty years older. Away from the mud and heat of her Bangladeshi village, home is now a...
 

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Child 44
Tom Rob Smith
In Stalin's Soviet Union, crime does not exist. But still millions live in fear. The mere suspicion of disloyalty to the State, the wrong word at the wrong time, can send an innocent person to his...
 

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Chocolat
Joanne Harris
When an exotic stranger, Vianne Rocher, arrives in the French village of Lansquenet and opens a chocolate boutique directly opposite the church, Father Reynaud denounces her as a serious moral danger...
 

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Cloud Atlas
David Mitchell
'Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies ...' A reluctant voyager crossing the Pacific in 1850; a disinherited composer blagging a precarious livelihood in between-the-wars Belgium; a high-minded...
 

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Disgrace
J. M. Coetzee
A divorced, middle-aged English professor finds himself increasingly unable to resist affairs with his female students. When discovered by the college authorities, he is expected to apologise and...
 

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Fingersmith
Sarah Waters
London 1862. Sue Trinder, orphaned at birth, grows up among petty thieves - fingersmiths - under the rough but loving care of Mrs Sucksby and her 'family'. But from the moment she draws breath, Sue's...
 

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Girl With a Pearl Earring
Tracy Chevalier
A sumptuous new look for Tracy Chevalier's bestselling novel. Griet, the young daughter of a tilemaker in seventeeth century Holland, obtains her first job, as a servant in Vermeer's household....
 

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Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell
Susanna Clarke
Two magicians shall appear in England. The first shall fear me; the second shall long to behold me The year is 1806. England is beleaguered by the long war with Napoleon, and centuries have passed...
 

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Life of Pi
Yann Martel
After the tragic sinking of a cargo ship, a solitary lifeboat remains bobbing on the wild, blue Pacific. The only survivors from the wreck are a sixteen year-old boy named Pi, a hyena, a zebra (with...
 

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Middlesex
Jeffrey Eugenides
'I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day of January 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of l974. My...
 

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Oxygen
Andrew Miller
In the summer of 1997, four people reach a turning point: Alice Valentine, who lies gravely ill in her West Country home; her two sons, one still searching for a sense of direction, the other...
 

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Restless
William Boyd
It is 1939. Eva Delectorskaya is a beautiful 28-year-old Russian emigree living in Paris. As war breaks out she is recruited for the British Secret Service by Lucas Romer, a mysterious Englishman,...
 

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Salmon Fishing in the Yemen
Paul Torday
This is the story of Dr Alfred Jones, a fisheries scientist - for whom diary -notable events include the acquisition of a new electric toothbrush and getting his article on caddis fly larvae...
 

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Shantaram
Gregory David Roberts
In 1978, gifted student and writer Greg Roberts turned to heroin when his marriage collapsed, feeding his addiction with a string of robberies. Caught and convicted, he was given a nineteen-year...
 

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Small Island
Andrea Levy
In this delicately wrought and profoundly moving, multi-award winning novel, Andrea Levy handles the weighty themes of empire, prejudice, war and love, with a lightness of touch and a generosity of...
 

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Suite Francaise
Irene Nemirovsky
In June 1940 France fell to the Nazis. The effects of this momentous event on the lives of ordinary Parisians and the inhabitants of a small rural community under occupation are brilliantly explored...
 

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The Book Thief
Markus Zusak
HERE IS A SMALL FACT - YOU ARE GOING TO DIE. 1939. Nazi Germany. The country is holding its breath. Death has never been busier. Liesel, a nine-year-old girl, is living with a foster family on Himmel...
 

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The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas
John Boyne
Lines may divide us, but hope will unite us ...Nine-year-old Bruno knows nothing of the Final Solution and the Holocaust. He is oblivious to the appalling cruelties being inflicted on the people of...
 

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The Corrections
Jonathan Franzen
From the author of 'Freedom', a richly realistic and darkly hilarious masterpiece about a family breakdown in an age of easy fixes. After fifty years as a wife and mother, Enid Lambert is ready to...
 

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The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
Mark Haddon
Christopher is 15 and lives in Swindon with his father. He has Asperger's Syndrome, a form of autism. He is obsessed with maths, science and Sherlock Holmes but finds it hard to understand other...
 

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The Five People You Meet in Heaven
Mitch Albom
THE FIVE PEOPLE YOU MEET IN HEAVEN is a wonderfully moving fable that addresses the meaning of life, and life after death, in the poignant way that made TUESDAYS WITH MORRIE such an astonishing book....
 

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The Gathering
Anne Enright
The nine surviving children of the Hegarty clan gather in Dublin for the wake of their wayward brother Liam. It wasn't the drink that killed him - although that certainly helped - it was what...
 

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The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Stieg Larsson
Forty years ago, Harriet Vanger disappeared from a family gathering on the island owned and inhabited by the powerful Vanger clan. Her body was never found, yet her uncle is convinced it was murder -...
 

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The Gone-away World
Nick Harkaway
The Jorgmund Pipe is the backbone of the world, and it's on fire. Gonzo Lubitsch, professional hero and troubleshooter, is hired to put it out - but there's more to the fire, and the Pipe itself,...
 

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The Kite Runner
Khaled Hosseini
Twelve-year-old Amir is desperate to win the approval of his father and resolves to win the local kite-fighting tournament, to prove that he has the makings of a man. His loyal friend Hassan promises...
 

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The Line of Beauty
Alan Hollinghurst
It is the summer of 1983, and young Nick Guest, an innocent in the matters of politics and money, has moved into an attic room in the Notting Hill home of the Feddens: Gerald, an ambitious new Tory...
 

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The Lovely Bones
Alice Sebold
My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973. My murderer was a man from our neighborhood. My mother liked his border flowers, and my...
 

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The Master
Colm Toibin
In January 1895 Henry James anticipates the opening of his first play, Guy Domville, in London. The production fails, and he returns, chastened and humiliated, to his writing desk. The result is a...
 

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The Night Watch
Sergei Lukyanenko
Walking the streets of Moscow, indistinguishable from the rest of its population, are the Others. Possessors of supernatural powers and capable of entering the Twilight, a shadowy parallel world...
 

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The Outcast
Sadie Jones
1957, and Lewis Aldridge is travelling back to his home in the South of England. He is straight out of jail and nineteen years old. His return will trigger the implosion not just of his family, but...
 

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The Poisonwood Bible
Barbara Kingsolver

 

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The Road
Cormac McCarthy
A father and his son walk alone through burned America, heading through the ravaged landscape to the coast. This is the profoundly moving story of their journey. The Road boldly imagines a future...
 

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The Road Home
Rose Tremain
'On the coach, Lev chose a seat near the back and he sat huddled against the window, staring out at the land he was leaving ...' Lev is on his way to Britain to seek work, so that he can send money...
 

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The Rotters' Club
Jonathan Coe
Jonathan Coe's widely acclaimed novel is set in the 1970s against a distant backdrop of strikes, terrorist attacks and growing racial tension. A group of young friends inherit the editorship of their...
 

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The Sea
John Banville
'A masterly study of grief, memory and love recollected' - Professor John Sutherland, Chair of Judges, Man Booker Prize 2005. When art historian Max Morden returns to the seaside village where he...
 

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The Secret Scripture
Sebastian Barry
Nearing her one-hundredth birthday, Roseanne McNulty faces an uncertain future, as the Roscommon Regional Mental hospital where she's spent the best part of her adult life prepares for closure. Over...
 

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The Shadow of the Wind
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
Hidden in the heart of the old city of Barcelona is the 'cemetery of lost books', a labyrinthine library of obscure and forgotten titles that have long gone out of print. To this library, a man...
 

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The Star of the Sea
Joseph O'Connor
In the bitter winter of 1847, from an Ireland torn by injustice and natural disaster, the Star of the Sea sets sail for New York. On board are hundreds of fleeing refugees. Among them are a...
 

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The Tenderness of Wolves
Stef Penney
1867, Canada: as winter tightens its grip on the isolated settlement of Dove River, a man is brutally murdered and a 17-year old boy disappears. Tracks leaving the dead man's cabin head north towards...
 

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The Time Traveler's Wife
Audrey Niffenegger
At its core The Time Traveler's Wife is an old-fashioned love story. A terrific book...startlingly original' Observer. 'Wonky, sexy, incredible' The Times. This is the extraordinary love story of...
 

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The White Tiger
Aravind Adiga
Meet Balram Halwai, the 'White Tiger': servant, philosopher, entrepreneur and murderer. Balram, the White Tiger, was born in a backwater village on the River Ganges, the son of a rickshaw-puller. He...
 

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Vernon God Little
D. B. C. Pierre

 

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We Need to Talk About Kevin
Lionel Shriver
This title is winner of the orange prize for fiction 2005. Two years ago, Eva Khatchadourian's son, Kevin, murdered seven of his fellow high-school students, a cafeteria worker, and a popular algebra...
 

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When Will There be Good News?
Kate Atkinson
In rural Devon, six-year-old Joanna Mason witnesses an appalling crime. Thirty years later the man convicted of the crime is released from prison. In Edinburgh, sixteen-year-old Reggie works as a...
 

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White Teeth
Zadie Smith
One of the most talked about fictional debuts of recent years, White Teeth is a funny, generous, big-hearted novel, adored by critics and readers alike. Dealing - among many other things - with...

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Orion 20th Anniversary This month's 'featured books'
Orion 20th Anniversary
The Reader
Bernhard Schlink
A Special Edition of The Reader by Bernhard Schlink to celebrate Orion's 20th anniversary. One of my favourite books of 1998, the sort that, on completion, leaves you stunned and really does stay with you for – well, in my case...
Format: Paperback - Released: 20/02/2012
 
 

Tell No One
Harlan Coben
A Special Edition of Tell No One by Harlan Coben to celebrate Orion's 20th anniversary. January 2011 Guest Editor Lisa Gardner on Harlan Coben... His breakout thriller Tell No One remains one of my favourite novels, and I consider Harlan the...
Format: Paperback - Released: 20/02/2012
 
 

Himalaya
Michael Palin
A Special Edition of Himalaya by Michael Palin to celebrate Orion's 20th anniversary. Winner of TV& Film Book of the Year at the British Book Awards 2005 The beautiful, glossy, illustrated hardback that accompanied the television series brought down to a text-led portable-sized paperback...
Format: Paperback - Released: 20/02/2012
 
 

The Six Wives of Henry VIII
Antonia Fraser
A Special Edition of The Six Wives of Henry VIII by Antonia Fraser to celebrate Orion's 20th anniversary. The six wives of Henry VIII - Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anna of Cleves, Katherine Howard and Catherine Parr...
Format: Paperback - Released: 20/02/2012
 
 

Books of the Month This month's 'featured books'
Books of the Month
Tom-All-Alone's
Lynn Shepherd
February 2012 Book of the Month. Described by the author as an homage to Charles Dickens but also an incredibly well researched and re-imagined, gripping Victorian murder mystery based on his classic
Format: Hardback - Released: 02/02/2012
 
 

Siege
Simon Kernick
February 2012 Book of the Month. One of Britain’s top writers has in Siege created a real edge-of-your-seat race against time thriller. A top London hotel is being held hostage along with everyone...
Format: Hardback - Released: 19/01/2012
 
 

Pantheon
Sam Bourne
February 2012 Book of the Month. A truth unearthed by Jonathan Freedland, who writes under the pseudonym Sam Bourne, is the idea at the centre of this explosive WW2 thriller. While we thought...
Format: Hardback - Released: 16/02/2012
 
 

The Guardians
Andrew Pyper
February 2012 Book of the Month. This fifth book from Canadian author Andrew Pyper is a cracker. Scary and thrilling, it is hard to close the book once you start. With a mix...
Format: Paperback - Released: 02/02/2012
 
 

Author of the Month This month's 'featured books'
Author of the Month
Fortune's Rocks
Anita Shreve
This is considered one of her best novels and does deserve such praise. A wonderfully descriptive book, it is the attention to detail that makes this such an absorbing read, you can picture every line on each character’s face, each...
Format: Paperback - Released: 04/01/2001
 
 

Sea Glass
Anita Shreve
Shreve brings us some great characters along with a good historical novel based around the time of The Depression after the stock market collapse of 1929. If you don’t know much about this period she provides interesting insight into the...
Format: Paperback - Released: 21/11/2002
 
 

A Change in Altitude
Anita Shreve
Anita Shreve always manages to throw a curve ball into events and change her characters lives irrevocably. A newly married couple find out how little they know about each other while on a Kenyan expedition. Get ready for powerful, emotional...
Format: Paperback - Released: 29/04/2010
 
 

Resistance
Anita Shreve
Anita Shreve's compelling fourth novel - set in German-occupied Belgium in 1943-44.
Format: Paperback - Released: 02/05/1996
 
 

eBooks This month's 'featured books'
eBooks
The Winds of Folly
Seth Hunter
1796: Nathan Peake, captain of the frigate Unicorn is sent with a small squadron into the Adriatic to help bring Venice into an Italian alliance against the French. He establishes a British naval presence, harrying the French corsairs that swarm...
Format: Paperback - Released: 02/02/2012
 
 

The Report
Jessica Francis Kane
Featured on The TV Book Club on More4 on 11 March 2012. An evocative and moving debut novel - based on the true story of the worst UK civilian disaster of the Second World War, when 173 people were crushed to...
Format: Paperback - Released: 02/02/2012
 
 

Good People
Ewart Hutton
February 2012 eBook of the Month. Small town hypocrisy shamelessly satirised in a twisting murder plot in rural Wales. An entertaining, cleverly plotted debut.
Format: Hardback - Released: 02/02/2012
 
 

Rescue
Anita Shreve
February 2012 Book of the Month. A tale of love, banishment and renewal, Rescue is a perfectly paced novel, written with Shreve's skilful lightness of touch and perceptive characterisation. Alternating between the life-and-death...
Format: Paperback - Released: 02/02/2012
 
 

Debuts of the Month This month's 'featured books'
Debuts of the Month
The Sky's Dark Labyrinth
Stuart Clark
February 2012 Debut of the Month. A vivid, thrilling portrayal of the lives and work of Kepler and Galileo and their struggles with the social and political forces around them. It's the first...
Format: Paperback - Released: 17/10/2011
 
 

22 Britannia Road
Amanda Hodgkinson
After living wild in the forests for years, carrying a terrible secret, all Silvana knows is that she and Aurek are survivors. Everything else is lost. While Janusz, a Polish soldier who has criss-crossed Europe during the war, hopes his...
Format: Paperback - Released: 02/02/2012
 
 

Good People
Ewart Hutton
February 2012 eBook of the Month. Small town hypocrisy shamelessly satirised in a twisting murder plot in rural Wales. An entertaining, cleverly plotted debut.
Format: Hardback - Released: 02/02/2012
 
 

The Tiger's Wife
Tea Obreht
February 2012 Book of the Month. Shortlisted for the Galaxy International Author of the Year Award 2011. THE ORANGE PRIZE WINNING DEBUT FROM A TRULY EXTRAORDINARY TALENT. A Special Edition of The Tiger's Wife...
Format: Paperback - Released: 20/02/2012
 
 

Guest Editor - Joanna Trollope This month's 'featured books'
Guest Editor - Joanna Trollope
The Soldier's Wife
Joanna Trollope
Can a man trained to fight adjust again to family and domestic life? And how will the family cope if he can't? Through the well observed, astute yet sensitive eye of the author this novel takes a keen look at...
Format: Hardback - Released: 02/02/2012
 
 

Daughters-in-law
Joanna Trollope
January 2012 Book of the Month. Shortlisted for the Galaxy Popular Fiction Book of the Year Award 2011. Rachel has always been at the centre of her family of three sons but now the...
Format: Paperback - Released: 05/01/2012
 
 

Miss Mackenzie
Anthony Trollope
February 2012 Guest Editor Joanna Trollope on Anthony Trollope... The real Trollope. Of all the Victorians, Anthony Trollope is the most profoundly psychological of novelists – and he was writing long before Freud!. His women are particularly good, especially when...
Format: Paperback - Released: 14/03/2008
 
 

A Village Affair
Joanna Trollope
To all intents and purposes this was Joanna’s first novel and it was the start of a genre labelled ‘aga saga’ – upper-middleclass country families getting into all sorts of messes. Joanna is queen of this type of novel and...
Format: Paperback - Released: 21/09/1990
 
 


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