Characters

How specific should I get? I'll welcome all suggestions, so let's see: I'm looking for a book to get be back into reading. I love characters and the drama of real, believable people. My pet peeve are beautiful, intelligent, moral protagonists who save entire villages from evil Nazis. I don't care about the genre, the setting isn't very relevant, but I do enjoy learning about times and places I wouldn't otherwise visit, and I want to feel things I would otherwise not feel. I also love good writers, who use the right words, not just the simplest. Past favorites are everything by Steinbeck, older John Irving, Room, A Man Called Ove, We Need to Talk About Kevin, Cold Mountain, to name a few. TIA