unwize

I'd like to suggest Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee. It was the Booker winner in 1999, and Coetzee subsequently won the Nobel Prize for Literature. It's pretty dark, with a particularly unsympathetic protagonist, but I found it offerred some profound insights into the human condition, and I still feel it's influence on me more than a decade after reading it.

I started with Number9Dream, which was the Booker nominated that preceded Cloud Atlas. It's a great read, and I think probably his most accessible and entertaining. It's set in contemporary Japan, is very Murakami inspired, and each of the 9 chapters adopting a different theme. Great stuff. Obviously Cloud Atlas and Jacob De Zoet are his more accomplished works, and you can't go wrong starting with either. His original novel, Ghostwritten, has some very interesting bits, but definitely one of his weaker works, alongside the semi-autobiographical Black Swan Green. You can safely leave those until last!