The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer

A gut-wrenching story of Hungarian people during WWII, Julie Orringer's novel is thick with detail about how the oncoming and ongoing war affected the lives of young Hungarians trying to pursue professions in a very uncertain environment. Mostly it is told from the point of view of Andras Levi who at age 18 leaves Hungary to study architecture in Paris. His family is Jewish; and, with the hindsight of history, the reader feels the threat of changing laws and attitudes and the impending Nazi doom. Much of the story centers around Budapest as Hungarian Jews in foreign countries are forced by arbitrary visa expirations to return to their native countries. What Andras experiences during the war and how much of his family is able to survive keeps the reader glued to the story. Good book set in an interesting place and time.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell

In 1799 a Dutchman named Jacob de Zoet sailed to Japan as a clerk for the Dutch East Indies Company. His job was to straighten out the messy accounts left by predecessors and in the course of this work he uncovers corruption and fraud; he also makes and loses money, and he falls in love with a medical student who gets whisked off to be held prisoner in a nunnery. Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas, is an excellent writer who packs lots of meaning into few words. Sometimes his style feels cryptic; other times he runs two conversations at once so you have to look at every other sentence to make sense of each. Good novel, but not easy reading.