10. The English Patient. Michael Ondaatje. Sri Lanka/Canada. (1991)
Part love story, part mystery, part war story. The English Patient is as complex and full of mirages as the desert that plays so important a character in the book. The title character is a burned soldier with no face onto whom the other characters – a Canadian nurse, an Indian bomb disposal expert and Carravagio, a Canadian thief and morphine addict, project their hopes and fears. But the English patient is not who he seems and through the novel he reveals his life before his accident and his love affair with an English woman that leads to tragedy.

9. A Suitable Boy. Vikram Seth. India. (1994)
As vast and sprawling as the country of which it relates, A Suitable Boy is, on the surface, a simple story. Set in post-independence India, the novel follows the story of four families over a period of 18 months as a mother searches for a suitable boy to marry her daughter. But in relating this story, Seth also discusses the history of post colonial India, the Partition, Hindu-Muslim strife, and state and national politics. However, the book is also firmly rooted in the themes of of love and marriage and the book both begins and ends with weddings.

8. High Fidelity. Nick Hornby. UK. (1995)
The title is a play on words between music and sexual loyalty – the novel’s two themes. Rob is a record shop owner who, with his friends, sits around making mixed tapes, top five lists and waxing lyrical about music. When his girlfriend leaves him he falls into a crisis and sets out to find a purpose in life. A very funny exploration about floating through life, dating, music snobbery, the childishness of grown men and, finally, how to find meaning and purpose in the mundane and normal. A better book might actually be his first novel, Fever Pitch, but as so much of that book is actually non-fiction, it didn't qualify for this list.

7. Underworld. Don DeLillo. US. (1997)
A sprawling novel that encapsulates baseball, Frank Sinatra, the Cuban missile crisis, J. Edgar Hoover and Lenny Bruce and waste management, DeLillo’s masterpiece is regarded by many as the best American novel of the last 20 years. Following the life of a waste management executive, the novel explores three main themes - the fate of a baseball from the winning game of the 1951 world series, the threat of atomic warfare, and the garbage created by modern society - DeLillo freely moves forwards and backwards through the decades, introducing characters and situations and gradually showing the way their lives are interconnected.

6. The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. Haruki Murakami. Japan. (1997)
A mesmerizing and surreal novel from Japan. A boring man’s life becomes increasingly strange and complicated after an obscene phone call from a woman who seems to know him awfully well disrupts his sleepy routine. Then he meets Malta Kano, a psychic who's supposedly searching for his lost cat; an ex-prositute who dresses like Jackie Kennedy and Lt. Mamiya, a WWII vet who tells him of the atrocities he witnessed on the Mongolian front; a mother-son duo who introduce him to an unusual way of making lots of cash. and finally a 16-year-old girl who lives down the street who becomes his understanding friend. The characters float drift out again leaving the protagonist everyman to figure out his own identity --  a word not actually found in Japanese.

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