Peter Hoeg:
The Woman and the Ape
Smilla's Sense of Snow
Hoeg is an unbelievably orginal danish novelist. I read Woman & ape through and then reread it cos the plot really took twists that I wanted to read it again to see how he develops it when I didn't see the ending before hand when you usually know how things are going to go after you've read the first chapter of a book. His style is sharp and witty with hints of magical realism in it and this makes me often wonder how intelligent he actually has to be.
****Other favorites by genre:
Magical realism:
*One hundred years of solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marguez
Read it three times through and taken it from the self to quote some part to a friend in a mail many times. Beautiful and magical, pseudohistorical and warm-hearted.
Scifi:
*Dune by Frank Herbert
The first part is the best of this more-than-five-books-long-trilogy.
Scifi-dystopias, the 3 great ones:
*Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
*1984 by George Orwell
*The Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
These books are considered common knowledge.
Fantasy/humor:
*Good Omens by Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman
I've reread Hitchiker's guide and it doesn't amuse me nowadays like it did when I was 12, but Good Omens hasn't lost the touch. It still gets me to laugh out loud.
History & anthropology, but can be read as a novel as it is also a story of an american woman who was first ever (and possibly still only) western woman to get a REAL geisha training:
*Geisha by Lisa Dalby
Fictional, but historical:
*Sinuhe the Egyptian by Mika Waltari
(Based on poem telling the tale of Sinuhe by unknown writer from 1875 BC., this novel is actually so correct and rich in historical details it's listed in some universities as new student's source material of egyptology.)