In her 3rd appearance, girlfriend-for-hire Melissa Romney-Jones has been asked to help reform playboy Prince Nicolas of Hollenberg by doing what she does best--acting as a surrogate girlfriend by teaching etiquette, improving bachelor wardrobes, and providing advice. This alter ego is Honey Blennerhesket--think "Mary Poppins with silk stockings." However, as Melissa and her fiancé plan their wedding, complications ensue, and she winds up juggling the affections of three very different men. Lots of fun for anglophiles and chick lit readers.

Che Selkirk is seven years old when a woman arrives at his grandmother's Upper East Side apartment in 1972, where he has been raised since his activist mother was involved in an accident at a protest while holding the one-year-old Che. Believing that this woman is his mother, and told no differently by his grandmother, Che runs off with the woman, who asks Che to call her Dial. They end up in the wilds of Queensland, Australia, where Che, a precocious boy, discovers that Dial isn't truly equipped to raise him safely. The slowly emerging truth about their relationship makes for a "psychologically astute and diabolically suspenseful novel" (Booklist).

Irem is 15 the night an earthquake destroys her home in a small town outside of Istanbul. She and her family are sent to live in an American refugee camp, where their interaction with their former neighbors, an American Christian family, leads to an earthquake of a metaphorical kind. Her father, a Kurd who despises Americans for their involvement in the destruction of Kurdish villages by Turks, wants to move his family away from Western influences, and will not stand idly by as he sees his daughter fall in love with an American, or his son grow interested in Christianity. More than anything, this debut novel is a "richly detailed, finely plotted demonstration of culture clash" (Booklist).

For those who don't know, the Konkans to which this book refers are the descendants of a group of Indians converted to Catholicism by the Portuguese in the 16th century. Francisco D'Sai is a first-born son in a long line of first-born Konkan sons, but his father is a Konkan who wants only to be accepted into white suburban society. His mother, on the other hand, is an American who went to India with the Peace Corps and wanted to stay forever. Though Francisco is born and grows up in Chicago, it is his mother and his Konkan uncle who surround him with colorful tales of India and his Konkan heritage. As narrator, Francisco observes them--and their struggles.

When 17-year-old Meera marries an aspiring singer in order to escape her overbearing father, she finds herself further marginalized by her demanding husband, her lustful brother-in-law, and the religious orthodoxy of her new family. Her unhappy marriage is further compounded when her husband, realizing that he will never achieve his dreams, becomes an alcoholic. Her one bright spot is her son, but her overweening love for him soon becomes suffocating. Kirkus Reviews calls their story, told against the backdrop of India's independence and the political struggles that followed, "finely conceived, absorbing and powerful."

Jasper Dean needs a way to fill the time (he's in jail), so he decides to write his life story (his only other viable option is to go insane). He realizes, however, that his story is as much about his much-despised father as it is about him, so he starts by getting one important fact out of the way: his father's body, he claims, will never be found. From there he goes into the dizzying tale of his life with his father, a brilliant if difficult man, which takes him on a series of utterly nutty escapades across Australia. "This is one rampaging and irresistible debut," says Booklist.

The Feast of Love is exactly what it sounds like--an assortment of intertwined and deliciously told stories of love flavored with everything from passion to regret. They feature a man working to get over his first--and then his second--wife, a young couple madly in love, and a professor who longs for his missing son. The 2007 movie had an all-star cast (including Morgan Freeman and Greg Kinnear), but you should read the book to get a true taste of "the seemingly effortless ebb and flow of the author's clear-sighted yet deeply poetic vision" (Publishers Weekly).

In Jonathan Safran Foer's "haunting debut" (Kirkus Reviews), an American college student named Jonathan Safran Foer goes to Ukraine to search for the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis. He's aided in his search by a translator named Alex, whose hilarious malapropisms and broken English add an element of humor to the quest. Make no mistake, however--there's as much tragedy as there is farce. In the 2005 movie, Elijah Wood played Jonathan Safran Foer, and the author himself had a cameo as a leaf blower.

Nine-year-old Eliza Naumann is an indifferent student ignored by her father, a brilliant scholar of Jewish mysticism, in favor of her "gifted and talented" older brother, Aaron. All that changes when she starts winning spelling bees. As their father starts spending more time with Eliza, grilling her for the next level of competition and seeing in her a pathway to God, Aaron looks for fulfillment elsewhere, and finds it with the Hare Krishnas. Meanwhile, breadwinner mom Miriam is losing her grip on reality, and is breaking into other people's houses as a way to give her life meaning. This touching debut was made into a movie in 2005, and starred Richard Gere and Juliette Binoche, with Flora Cross as Eliza.

This rich portrait of intergenerational relations and the immigrant experience follows the members of the Ganguli family, who leave behind their traditional life in India for a middle-class life in Massachusetts in the late 1960s. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri (Interpreter of Maladies) captures their difficulties merging with the American way of life over three decades, two continents, and two generations. The Namesake was made into a movie of the same name in 2006.

In an English manor in 1935, 13-year-old Briony Tallis misinterprets several encounters between her older sister, Cecilia, and her childhood friend Robbie Turner, and when a cousin is sexually assaulted, Briony quite simply becomes the victim of her own vivid imagination. Sadly, when she acts upon her beliefs and accuses Robbie of her cousin's assault, she unleashes a terrible series of events. When she comes to realize that she might have been wrong, she begins to seek a way to atone for her error. This award-winning book was the basis for the 2007 movie, which was nominated for seven Academy Awards.

Miranda Priestley, editor of Runway magazine, is a name that strikes fear into the hearts of many an editorial and personal assistant. For recent Ivy League graduate Andrea Sachs, working for Miranda is just the first step on her way to an editorial position with The New Yorker--but how is Andy to get editorial or writing experience if her days (and nights) are spent catering to Miranda's every demanding and outrageous whim? Between fetching (lunch) and delivering (laundry), Andy does have some perks (designer clothes), but she's not so sure that they're worth working for the boss from hell. This entertaining novel was the basis for the 2006 movie starring Anne Hathaway and Meryl Streep.