"The White Tiger" by Aravind Adiga

From "The New Yorker:" In this darkly comic debut novel (winner of the 2008 Man Booker Prize) set in India, Balram, a chauffeur, murders his employer, justifying his crime as the act of a "social entrepreneur." In a series of letters to the Premier of China... the chauffeur recounts his transformation from an honest, hardworking boy growing up in "the Darkness"... to a determined killer. He places the blame for his rage squarely on the avarice of the Indian elite, among whom bribes are commonplace, and who perpetuate a system in which many are sacrificed to the whims of the few. Adiga's message isn't subtle or novel, but Balram's appealingly sardonic voice and acute observations of the social order are both winning and unsettling.

"Cutting for Stone" by Abraham Verghese

The Washington Post - W. Ralph Eubanks
Even with its many stories and layers, Cutting for Stone remains clear and concise. Verghese paints a vivid picture of these settings, the practice of medicine (he is also a physician) and the characters' inner conflicts. I felt as though I were with these people, eating dinner with them even, feeling the hot spongy injera on my fingers as they dipped it into a spicy wot. In The Interior Castle, Saint Teresa's work on mystical theology, she wrote, "I began to think of the soul as if it were a castle made of a single diamond or of very clear crystal, in which there are many rooms, just as in Heaven there are many mansions." Cutting for Stone shines like that place.