Authors you may find interesting and/or stylistically helpful

Short stories
Alice Munro
Katherine Mansfield
William Trevor
Elizabeth Bowen
Flannery O’Connor
John Cheever
David Foster Wallace
(and also just look in The New Yorker for short stories)

Some novels to try (or just names of novelists) in no particular order (In red I put the
ones I actually like)
Graham Greene- The Quiet American 
Julian Barnes - Flaubert's Parrot and/or A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters, and
his latest novel- The Music of Time 
Ian McEwan- Atonement; Enduring Love
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie- Half of a Yellow Sun; Purple Hibiscus and Americanah 
Andrea Levy-Small Island 
Arundhati Roy- The God of Small Things (quite difficult)
Pat Barker- Regeneration 
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala- Heat and Dust 
J.M Coetzee- Disgrace [not for the faint-hearted- it's terribly depressing..]
Nadine Gordimer- No Time Like The Present; July's People
Doris Lessing- The Grass is Singing [also very depressing]
David Lodge (to cheer you up)
Kazuo Ishiguro – anything by him is beautifully written
George Orwell – novels or short stories or reportage
Margaret Atwood – The Handmaid’s Tale; the Blind Assassin; Alias Grace
John Steinbeck
Ernest Hemingway (don’t emulate his very unadorned style in the exam!)
F Scott Fitzgerald – the Great Gatsby. Tender is the Night. Short stories
Toni Morrison – difficult but worth the effort
Alice Walker – The Color Purple
Maya Angelou – I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Jennifer Johnson
William Boyd
Colm Toibin
Saki
Donna Tartt
Ann Patchett
Kate Atkinson
Sebastian faulks – especially Birdsong
Helen Dunmore
Penelope Lively
Penelope Fitzgerald
Rose Tremain - for example The Gustav Sonata and a rather long one, Restoration.
Elizabeth Jane Howard - four or five novels called the Cazalet Chronicles. The first one
is The Light Years.
Very easy reading - The trouble with Goats and Sheep by Joanna Cannon; The Portable
Veblen by Elizabeth McKenzie; Where'd you Go, Bernadatte by Maria Semple; The
Guernsey Literary and Potato peel Pie society by Mary Ann Shaffer. 
More serious, anything by Pat Barker. I am particularly keen on Regeneration. Basically
I love books about wartime (tho not war itself)
Among 19th century I love Mrs Gaskell, but the books are very long. Also George Eliot,
but long too. I love Bleak House by Dickens, but it is long.