Take Me With You
by Catherine Ryan Hyde | 
Empire Falls
by Richard Russo | 
Anne of Windy Poplars
by Lucy Maud Montgomery | 
The Sense of an Ending
by Julian Barnes | 
Out Stealing Horses
by Per Petterson | 
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
by David Eggers | 
2666
by Roberto Bolano | 
Buying the Farm
by Kimberly Conn | 
Flight Behavior
by Barbara Kingsolver | 
Harbor of the Heart
by Katherine Spencer | 
The Book of Ruth
by Jane Hamilton | 
Everyman
by Philip Roth | 
We Were the Mulvaneys
by Joyce Carol Oates | 
Old School
by Tobias Wolff | 
South of Broad
by Pat Conroy | 
Men in the Sun and Other Palestinian Stories
by Ghassan Kanafani | 
The Wake Up
by Catherine Ryan Hyde | 
The Risk Pool
by Richard Russo | 
Drop City
by T. Coraghessan Boyle | 
The Children Act
by Ian McEwan |
During 1945 H. E. Bates spent some time in Burma and India with the aim of writing about the Burmese war for American readers. The experience inspired three 'Asian novels', one of which was "The Purple Plain". After returning to England he heard a story about a pilot who, having lost his wife to a German bomb while on honeymoon, as a consequence had become "a much-decorated hero by the dubious method of trying to get himself killed". It provided the spark that prompted Bates to start working on the novel (in any event, because of his experiences while over there, he was already keen to write about his time in Burma). In the novel, Forrester, commander at an air station on the "purple plain" of Burma, loses the will to live, but regains it upon meeting a young Burmese woman, Anna, who has passed through her own wartime trauma. He survives a plane crash, rescues a fellow pilot, and is finally reunited with Anna. It is a tale of human courage and endurance in the face of tremendous odds, and it was certainly "something different" for Bates. The book was published in late November 1947, and in 1954 the story was filmed starring Gregory Peck and Win Min Than.