Title

Author

Description

Level

Of Mice and Men

Steinbeck, John

A parable of commitment, loneliness, hope and loss, Of Mice And Men is a powerful and moving portrayal of two men striving to understand their own unique place in the world. Drifters in search of work, George and his simple-minded friend Lennie have nothing in the world except each other - and a dream. A dream that one day they will have some land of their own. But things do not go quite to plan…

*

Anita and Me

Syal, Meera

The story of nine-year-old Meena, the daughter of the only Punjabi family in the Midlands' mining village of Tollington. The novel provides a vision of British childhood in the 1960s, a childhood caught between two cultures, each on the brink of enormous change.

*

Fever Pitch

Hornby, Nick

Fever Pitch is both an autobiography and a footballing bible rolled into one. Nick Hornby pinpoints 1968 as his formative year – the year he turned 11, the year his parents separated, and the year his father first took him to watch Arsenal play. The author quickly moved "way beyond fandom" into an extreme obsession that has dominated his life, loves, and relationships. (see also About A Boy, High Fidelity etc)

*

Chocolat

Harris, Joanne

Lansquenet-sous-Tannes -a blip on the fast road between Toulouse and Bourdeaux - and new home to Vianne Rocher and her six-yearold daughter Anouk. Vianne opens a luxuriant chocolate shop, which bubbles over with the most tempting of confections. It's Lent, the shop is opposite the church Francis Reynaud, the austere parish priest is not exactly happy. When Vianne advertises a Grand Festival of Chocolate to start on Easter Sunday, it's all-out war between church and chocolate…

*

Mister Pip

Jones, Lloyd

In a village on the Papua New Guinea island of Bougainville during a * brutal civil war there in the 1990s, Matilda, the 13-year-old narrator, begins her story: a blockade has begun, helicopters circle, the generators are empty and all the teachers have fled. One white man remains. Mr Watts has a home in the jungle and an abiding love for Dickens; he believes in the power of literature to set minds free…

Devil May Care

Faulks, Sebastian

Picking up where Fleming left off, Sebastian Faulks takes Bond back to the height of the Cold War in a story of almost unbearable pace and tension. An Algerian drug runner is savagely executed in the desolate outskirts of Paris. Bond is assigned to shadow the mysterious Dr. Julius Gorner, a power-crazed pharmaceutical magnate, whose wealth is exceeded only by his greed. Gorner has lately taken a disquieting interest in opiate derivatives, both legal and illegal, and this urgently bears looking into…

*

A Gathering Light

Donnelly, Jennifer

It's 1906 and 16-year-old Mattie Gokey is at a crossroads in her life. She's escaped the overwhelming responsibilities of helping to run her father's brokedown farm in exchange for a paid summer job as a serving girl at a fancy hotel in the Adirondacks. At the hotel, Mattie gets caught up in the disappearance of a young woman, Grace Brown. When Grace is found drowned, Mattie reads the letters and finds that she holds the key to unravelling the girl's life.

*

Genesis

Beckett, Bernard

If robots began to self-evolve, learning to feel and create as we do, what traits would set humans apart--and help us survive? As the young historian Anax endures an examination by the Academy – the rulers of the future, we learn of the history of the twenty-first century: accelerating climate change, dust storms, rising fear and the Last War, and the rise of a new island republic sealed behind the Great Sea Fence. Plagues decimate human populations outside, while the Republic's surveillance society flourishes – until it falls to forces led by the young rebel Adam Forde.

*

Black Rabbit Summer

Brooks, Kevin

Pete Boland was busy doing nothing that summer. Long, stiflingly * hot, lazy days stretched ahead of him. Then she called. 'Listen, Pete ...you know that funfair, up at the recreation ground ...I thought we could all meet up ...You know, for old times' sake.' But, where there are old times, there are old tensions. And as secrets, bitterness and jealousies resurface, five old friends are plunged into the worst night of their lives...

Survivor

Palahniuk, Chuck

Survivor is a deranged comedy. From the very opening of the book Palahniuk lets us know that his narrator, Tender Branson, the last surviving member of a religious death cult, is on a path to selfdestruction. The tension in this book lies not in the outcome, but in the intricate plot that takes Tender from farm boy to media celebrity and ruin. This is a novel that examines what happens when religion meets the overindulgences of our consumerist society.

**

The Way Home

Pelecanos, George

**

The Catcher in the Rye

Salinger, J.D.

The latest crime novel from one of the writers of The Wire: When Thomas Flynn leaves his son, seventeen year old Chris, at Pine Ridge, a juvenile prison near Washington, D.C., his heart is broken but his mind is made up: Chris will have to pay for the mistakes he's made. Inside, Chris is exposed to kids from a different world than the comfortable one he knew. A decade later, Chris and the friends he made at Pine Ridge seem reformed. But when he and the others are inadvertently caught up in a burglary, old habits and worse instincts rise to the surface, threatening this new-found stability… Since his debut in 1951 as The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield has been synonymous with the ‘cynical adolescent’. Holden narrates the story of a couple of days in his 16-year-old life, just after he's been expelled from prep school, in a slang that sounds edgy even today and keeps this novel on banned book lists. A great novel which deals with the nature of grief and how it feels to be an outsider.

**

White Teeth

Smith, Jade

Epic in scale and intimate in approach, White Teeth is an ambitious novel. Genetics, eugenics, gender, race, class and history are the book's themes but Zadie Smith is gifted with the wit and inventiveness to make these weighty ideas seem effortlessly light. The story travels through Jamaica, Turkey, Bangladesh and India but ends up in a scrubby North London borough, home of the book's two unlikely heroes: prevaricating Archie Jones and intemperate Samad Iqbal.

**

The Abortionist’s Daughter

Hyde, Elisabeth

Nineteen-year-old Megan Thompson is beautiful, cool, clever and beautiful -and has consequently never been short of boyfriends. She has a love-hate relationship with her mother, Diana Duprey, an abortion doctor and, following the death of her younger brother, has mostly steered clear of family life. That is until the day her father calls to tell her that Diana has been found dead in their pool…

**

To Kill a Mockingbird

Lee, Harper

One of the greatest novels written in the 20th century, this book explores the nature of many issues including racism and prejudice in the southern states of America. The novel is written from the point of view of a young girl at the time and follows her journey as she grows up and witnesses the trial of an African-American accused of rape.

**

1984

Orwell, George

The greatest dystopian novel ever written. Hidden away in the Record Department of the sprawling Ministry of Truth, Winston Smith skilfully rewrites the past to suit the needs of the Party. Yet he inwardly rebels against the totalitarian world he lives in, which demands absolute obedience and controls him through the allseeing telescreens and the watchful eye of Big Brother, symbolic head of the Party. In his longing for truth and liberty, Smith begins a secret love affair with a fellow-worker Julia, but soon discovers the true price of freedom.

**

Casino Royale

Fleming, Ian

**

Neuromancer

Gibson, William

Bond is sent to a casino in Royale-les-Eaux to disgrace the lethal Russian agent ‘Le Chiffre’ by ruining him at baccarat and forcing his Soviet spymasters to ‘retire’ him, where he soon finds that his quarry is not content to go without a fight. Preferring to work alone, 007 is annoyed to be assigned a female assistant, but his compelling attraction to the enigmatic Vesper Lynd only leads him into further danger. A science-fiction classic, which invented the ‘cyberpunk’ genre. Case was the best interface cowboy who ever ran in Earth's computer matrix. Then he double- crossed the wrong people. Fate has a way of making amends, when he is forced to do one last job in the infinite bytes of cyberspace.

**

Lord of the Flies

Golding, William

Lord of the Flies, William Golding's classic tale about a group of English schoolboys who are plane-wrecked on a deserted island, is just as chilling and relevant today as when it was first published in 1954.

**

The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Hamid, Mohsin

Changez, a Pakistani Muslim from a once wealthy family in Lahore, experiences his own version of the American Dream when his talent and his Princeton scholarship lead him to a high-flying job in the world of New York finance and to relationship with a beautiful, enigmatic all-American girl. But, over aromatic food and exotic drinks back in Lahore, Changez relates in a one-sided conservation with an American traveller how he never felt entirely at ease and how the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the subsequent repercussions - both political and personal ones - roused him from his American Dream…

**

Miss Wyoming

Coupland, Douglas

The heroine of this outstanding tale of love is Susan Colgate, Miss Wyoming’s teen beauty-queen and talentless soap actress. Pushed into stardom by her demonically pushy mother, Susan's career is at rock-bottom. When she finds herself sole survivor of an air-crash, she views it as her opportunity to vanish, embarking on a voyage of personal discovery…

**

Captain Corelli’s Mandolin

De Bernieres, Louis

An extremely popular novel that is both compelling war story and romance. During WWII on the Greek island of Cephallonia, a young Italian captain is billeted in the doctor's house. Captain Corelli turns out to be an accomplished musician, and for a while the war seems to suit them well. But then the brutality of the conflict catches up with them…

**

Rebecca

Du Maurier, Daphne

Rebecca is real page-turner: there are numerous twists and turns in the plot and a wonderful cast of grotesque but believable characters. The story follows a young woman who, after accepting the much older Maxim de Winter's sudden proposal of marriage merely days after they meet in Monte Carlo, must contend with Maxim's stunningly beautiful late first wife, Rebecca, as she takes her place at her new husband's equally beautiful home Manderley.

**

My Family and Other Animals

Durrell, Gerald

When the unconventional Durrell family can no longer endure the damp, gray English climate, they do what any sensible family would do: sell their house and relocate to the sunny Greek isle of Corfu. My Family and Other Animals was intended to embrace the natural history of the island but ended up as a delightful account of Durrell’s family’s experiences.

**

The Virgin Suicides

Eugenides, Jeffrey

A beautiful, heartfelt coming of age tale addressing the love and darkness of adolescence. The novel tells the story of the Lisbon sisters, living in 1970's suburban America, who in turn each commit suicide. The story is told from the position of the neighbourhood boys who are obsessed with the sisters and try to piece together their lives.

**

After the First Death

Cormier, Robert

Girlfriend in a Coma

Coupland, Douglas

Cider with Rosie

Lee, Laurie

A Room With A View

Forster, E.M.

Brighton Rock

Greene, Graham

Pride and Prejudice

Austen, Jane

Jane Eyre

Bronte, Charlotte

The Woman in White

Collins, Wilkie

On the outskirts of a small American town, a bus-load of young children is being held hostage. The hijackers are a cold and ruthless group, opposed to the secret government agency Inner Delta. At the centre of the battle are three teenagers. Miro is the terrorist with no past and no emotions. Kate is the bus driver, caught up in the nightmare, and Ben is the General's son who must act as a gobetween. A novel about the end of the world, and what comes after it. Karen, an attractive, popular student, goes into a coma one night in 1979. Whilst in it, she gives birth to a healthy baby daughter. Eighteen years later, she wakes up and finds herself a middle-aged mother whose friends have all grown up but become lost along the way. But fate has much more in store for Karen in this apocalyptic tale... Cider with Rosie is a wonderfully vivid memoir of childhood in a remote Cotswold village, a village before electricity or cars, a timeless place on the verge of change. Growing up amongst the fields and woods and characters of the place, Laurie Lee depicts a world that is both immediate and real and belongs to a now-distant past. E. M. Forster is one of the great twentieth century authors. In this piece of social comedy, Forster is concerned with one of his favourite themes - "the undeveloped heart" of the English middle classes, who are here represented by a group of tourists and expatriates in Florence. Lucy Honeychurch finds self-knowledge in Italy, but what will she do with it on returning to Surrey? A gang war is raging through the dark underworld of Brighton. Seventeen-year-old Pinkie, malign and ruthless, has killed a man. Believing he can escape retribution, he is unprepared for the courageous, life-embracing Ida Arnold. Greene's gripping thriller, exposes a world of loneliness and fear, of life lived on the 'dangerous edge of things'. Elizabeth Bennet is at first determined to dislike Mr. Darcy, who is handsome and eligible. This misjudgement is only matched in folly by Darcy's arrogant pride. Their first impressions give way to truer feelings in a comedy concerned with happiness and how it might be achieved. Orphaned Jane Eyre grows up in the home of her heartless aunt, where she endures loneliness and cruelty, and at a charity school with a harsh regime. But when she finds love with her sardonic employer, Rochester, the discovery of his terrible secret forces her to make a choice. Should she stay with him and live with the consequences, or follow her convictions, even if it means leaving the man she loves? 'There, as if it had at that moment sprung out of the earth or dropped from the heaven - stood the figure of a solitary Woman, dressed from head to foot in white garments'. Walter Hartright's encounter with the nameless and distressed woman in white begins one of the greatest mystery thrillers in the English language. A gripping tale, intricately plotted and compellingly told.

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