The Crimson Petal and the White

by Michel Faber

Faber's bawdy, brilliant third novel tells an intricate tale of love and ambition and paints a new portrait of Victorian England and its citizens in prose crackling with insight and bravado. Using the wealthy Rackham clan as a focal point for his sprawling, gorgeous epic, Faber, like Dickens or Hardy, explores an era's secrets and social hypocrisy.

Now there's a BBC miniseries based on the novel.

The Last Templar

The Last Templar is a 2005 novel by Raymond Khoury, and also is his debut work. The novel topped the New York Times Bestseller list for 22 months.
In ad 1291, following the fall of Acre, Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem to the Saracens, a small party of Knights Templar leave the city with a small chest. Their ship, the Falcon Temple, is damaged in a storm at sea and sinks. One of the Knights is mortally wounded in the event; he dies on land after hiding a small leather pouch under a gravestone. He charges the remainder of the ship's company to deliver an encoded letter to the Head of the Templars.

Bright Shiny Morning

One of the most celebrated and controversial authors in America delivers his first novel—a sweeping chronicle of contemporary Los Angeles that is bold, exhilarating, and utterly original.
Throughout this strikingly powerful novel there is the relentless drumbeat of the millions of other stories that, taken as a whole, describe a city, a culture, and an age. A dazzling tour de force, Bright Shiny Morning illuminates the joys, horrors, and unexpected fortunes of life and death in Los Angeles.

The Historian

The Historian is the 2005 debut novel of American author Elizabeth Kostova. The plot blends the history and folklore of Vlad Tepes and his fictional equivalent Count Dracula. Kostova's father told her stories about Dracula when she was a child, and later in life she was inspired to turn the experience into a novel.

Amsterdam

Amsterdam is a 1998 novel by British writer Ian McEwan. It is a morality tale revolving around a newspaper editor and a composer. McEwan was awarded the Booker Prize for the novel.