[icarus]

One I always recommened: Roots by Alex Haley. Still one of my all-time favourites.

It's both:
Fact and Fiction
Literature and Popular Writing
Characterisation and Incident-Driven
History and Imagination

What more can you ask for in a book? You have to be patient for awhile at the beginning of the book though because not too much happens in a little African village until the shiznit goes down.

Also contains one of the most interesting literary techniques I ever come across that really draws the reader into the text (a little bit of a spoiler, so white text): Somewhere towards the middle of the book one main character is separated from another and while you keep expecting the other one to reappear you eventually realise that enough time has passed that he must be dead by now. Really makes the reader feel the loss and confusion of being separated from, and yearning for, a missing character.