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Here is a list of my favorite contemporary novels.
GENERAL FICTION
Affliction, Russell Banks
Geek Love, Katherine Dunn
Seeing Calvin Coolidge in a Dream, John Derbyshire
Enduring Love, Ian McEwan
A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess
The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro
The Last Crossing, Guy Vanderhaeghe
Corelli's Mandolin, Louis de Bernieres
Morality Play, Barry Unsworth
A Soldier of the Great War, Mark Helprin
Atonement, Ian McEwan
Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro
A Case of Curiosities, Allen Kurzweil
Postcards, Annie Proulx
Imperium, Robert Harris
SUSPENSE, ESPIONAGE, CRIME, BUT ALSO LITERATURE OF THE FIRST RANK
The Innocent, Ian McEwan
The Debt to Pleasure, John Lanchester
Reversible Errors, by Scott Turow
Restless, by William Boyd
A Perfect Spy, by John Le Carre
Motherless Brooklyn, by Jonathan Lethem
The Spies of Warsaw, by Alan Furst (and all of Furst's other books)
NOT QUITE IN FIRST RANK, BUT WORTHY OF MENTION
Rose, by Martin Cruz Smith
The Draining Lake, by Arnaldur Indridason
The Big Picture, by Douglas Kennedy (a suspense tale with a photography theme)
The Last Kashmiri Rose, Barbara Cleverly (a very nice historical mystery about Bengal)
BEST SCIENCE/GEOGRAPHY BOOKS I KNOW OF:
Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, by Richard Wrangham (2009). An excellent, scholarly, and thought-provoking collection of ideas related to cooking and human evolution.
A Voyage Long and Strange, by Tony Horwitz (2008, excellent, except for his reference to the hoax of the Kensington Runestone (e.g., he mentions the falsehood that the discoverer was a stonemason); I believe the evidence is overwhelming that it is completely legitimate).
The Hard Road West, by Keith Meldahl (2007); his description of geology of American West is unsurpassed.
After the Ice Age: The Return of Life to Glaciated North America, by Edith Pielou (1991; maybe out of print)