What books should I read with my English-language learners? →[More:]

I teach English to people in non-English-speaking countries. My students, with few exceptions, pretty much only do what's on the agenda for the lesson in class and whatever homework I might give them and don't do anything else in English - no reading, chatting, recipe-reading, weather-report-scanning...nothing. This is, given that many of my students are teenagers who are learning English in other places and are also in their normal school all week, not surprising.

This means that they don't know enough words. I'm not saying that individual students don't know particular words, but that their vocabularies and knowledge of phrases and "chunks" of language that native speakers use all the time and from an early age ("if I were you", "just because you X doesn't mean you Y", that kind of thing) is limited enough to prevent students in level X from dealing with texts not only at level X, but also texts below their level.

I'm moving to a new school in the fall, though, and I'd like to read some actual *books* in class as a way of both expanding their knowledge of sentence structure and grammar and having something non-textbook-based to work on and discuss.

So: I'm looking for your most excellent, award-winning, modern (post-1900), short novels (novellas? are all short novels novellas?) which wouldn't pose too much of a vocabulary challenge to students in the fall. A book like The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime is perfect: written in a clear style with few words that a basic paper dictionary couldn't handle, available widely/cheaply online, and stimulating enough for both older teenagers and adults. Another book I've been considering is Steinbeck's The Pearl, which I haven't read yet but have heard good things about in an English-teaching context.

The book(s) wouldn't be the whole of the course, either, but would supplement other work. We might spend an hour or so a week discussing, reading aloud, doing more close/detailed work on specific paragraphs.

Any novel with characters and a plot could work, really, but I want something my students see as doable - reading a whole book in English is something few of them have ever done and I want them to know, from day 1, that they can do it.

What are your ideas?