The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas

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The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is a 2006 novel about Germans and the Holocaust, from the point of view of a young boy, written by Irish novelist John Boyne. Unlike the months of planning Boyne devoted to his other books, he said that he wrote the entire first draft of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas in two and a half days, barely sleeping until he got to the end.

To date, the novel has sold more than 5 million copies around the world, and was published as The Boy in the Striped Pajamas in the United States. In both 2007 and 2008 it was the best selling book of the year in Spain. It has also reached number one on the New York Times bestseller list, as in the UK, Ireland , Australia and many other countries.

Margaret Atwood Oryx and Crake

Oryx and Crake is a dystopian science fiction^[1] novel by the Canadian author Margaret Atwood. Atwood has at times disputed the novel being science fiction, preferring to label it speculative fiction and "adventure romance" because it does not deal with 'things that have not been invented yet'^[2] and goes beyond the realism she associates with the novel form.^[3] Oryx and Crake was first published by McClelland and Stewart in 2003and was also shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction that same year.

Freedom Writers Diary

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Straight from the front line of urban America, the inspiring story of one fiercely determined teacher and her remarkable students.


As an idealistic twenty-three-year-old English teacher at Wilson High School in Long beach, California, Erin Gruwell confronted a room of “unteachable, at-risk” students. One day she intercepted a note with an ugly racial caricature, and angrily declared that this was precisely the sort of thing that led to the Holocaust—only to be met by uncomprehending looks. So she and her students, using the treasured books Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl and Zlata’s Diary: A Child’s Life in Sarajevo as their guides, undertook a life-changing, eye-opening, spirit-raising odyssey against intolerance and misunderstanding. They learned to see the parallels in these books to their own lives, recording their thoughts and feelings in diaries and dubbing themselves the “Freedom Writers” in homage to the civil rights activists “The Freedom Riders.”

With funds raised by a “Read-a-thon for Tolerance,” they arranged for Miep Gies, the courageous Dutch woman who sheltered the Frank family, to visit them in California, where she declared that Erin Gruwell’s students were “the real heroes.” Their efforts have paid off spectacularly, both in terms of recognition—appearances on “Prime Time Live” and “All Things Considered,” coverage in People magazine, a meeting with U.S. Secretary of Education Richard Riley—and educationally. All 150 Freedom Writers have graduated from high school and are now attending college.

With powerful entries from the students’ own diaries and a narrative text by Erin Gruwell, The Freedom Writers Diary is an uplifting, unforgettable example of how hard work, courage, and the spirit of determination changed the lives of a teacher and her students.

The authors’ proceeds from this book will be donated to The Tolerance Education Foundation, an organization set up to pay for the Freedom Writers’ college tuition. Erin Gruwell is now a visiting professor at California State University, Long Beach, where some of her students are Freedom Writers.

Tawni O'Dell : back roads

ABOUT TAWNI O'DELL

Tawni O'Dell, a western Pennsylvania native, earned a degree in journalism from Northwestern University. In addition to earning wages as a bank teller and a waitress, she put herself through college working as an exotic dancer jumping out of cakes at bachelor parties. A mother of two, she lives with her husband in Illinois.Back Roads is her first novel.

Book Summary Harley Altmyer should be in college drinking Rolling Rock and chasing girls. He should be freed from his closed-minded, stricken coal town, with its lack of jobs and no sense of humor. Instead, he's constantly reminded of just how messed up his life is. With his mother in jail for killing his abusive father, Harley is an orphan with the responsibilities of an adult and the fiery, aggressive libido of a teenager. Just nineteen years old, he's marooned in the Pennsylvania backwoods caring for his three younger sisters, whose feelings about him range from stifling dependence to loathing. And once he develops an obsession with the sexy, melancholic mother of two living down the road, those Victoria's Secret catalogs just won't do the trick anymore. He wants Callie Mercer so badly he fears he will explode. But it's the family secrets, the lies, and the unspoken truths that light the fuse and erupt into a series of staggering surprises, leaving what's left of his family in tatters. Through every ordeal, the unforgettable Harley could never know that his endearing humor, his love for his sisters, and his bumbling heroics would redeem them all. Funny and heartbreaking, Tawni O'Dell's pitch-perfect characters capture the maddening confusion of adolescence and the prickly nature of family with irony and unerring honesty. Back Roads is a riveting novel by a formidable new talent.

Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

Flowers for Algernon is the journal of Charlie Gordon, a mentally retarded adult who becomes a genius after undergoing a brain operation. Keyes gives Charlie Gordon a voice that conveys the full range of emotions Charlie experiences before and after the operation. Keyes conveys the drama with such intensity that it becomes almost painful to listen: the yearning of an amiable adult who longs to be as smart as those around him, the pain of the transformed man who must live with the newfound memories of cruel childhood rejection, and finally the horror of his diminishing intellectual capacity. Flowers for Algernon has been popular in all its formats short story, television drama, movie and novel.

P.D. James: The children of men

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The premise is simple - the entire human population has been rendered infertile. Any scientific attempts to find or fix the cause have failed spectatularly. And so, the world is heading to a very quiet and desperate extinction. The population ages and diminishes as people await the inevitable fading away of humanity. More importantly, hope and meaning have gone. There is no longer a point in doing anything because it will all soon disappear. The result is a world of atrocities and chaos. These have been largely avoided in the UK due to the rational dictatorship of the Warden and his cabinet, who have engineered calm and stability, with many tradeoffs on human rights and freedoms. Enter Otto, the Warden's cousin who is an academic and an unsympathetic snob. He is drawn into the beginnings of an extremely small, almost laughable rebellion, but one that changes Otto and the future of the country forever.

This is an extremely simple novel in its world description. Everything flows naturally from the premise, including all the new neuroses that society is stuck with. The book almost feels sparse. So if you insist on fast-paced thrillers only this is not for you. The reason I loved it was because in its sparseness it gives itself - and the reader - a lot of space to think and consider the issues. Unlike the movie where the government is sadistic and evil, things are much less black-and-white in the novel. There is almost an ambivalence for most of the work as to the question of whether the Warden's methods are wrong. The book is very emotional and almost spiritual -- James is magnificent at giving a sense of longing and nihilism present in a world that has no future. It's worth a read just for that

Reunion by Fred Uhlman

A daring novella about the loss of innocence in pre-war Germany.

Reunion is the story of intense and innocent devotion between two young men growing up in "the soft, serene, bluish hills of Swabia," and the sinister (but all too mundane) forces that end both their friendship and their childhood.

The year is 1932. Hans Schwartz is Jewish, the son of a Stuttgart doctor who asserts that the rise of the Nazis is "a temporary illness, something like measles which will pass off as soon as the economic situation improves." The Holocaust would be unthinkable for these characters, but of course it looms over the story: Hans's friend, the young Count Konradin von Hohenfels, has a mother who keeps a portrait of Hitler on her dresser. The two boys share their most private thoughts and trips to the countryside of southwest Germany, discuss poetry and the past and present of their country, and argue the existence of a benevolent God.

The eventual disintegration of this cherished relationship foreshadows the fate of Europe's Jews-- but Uhlman doesn't end his story with neat polarities. Years later, exiled in America, Hans comes upon a revelation about von Hohenfels which provides a stunning denouement and leaves the reader recalling Uhlman's haunting, lyrical descriptions of the vineyards, opera houses, and dark forests of Württemberg.

"Hundreds of bulky tomes have now been written about the age when corpses were melted into soap to keep the master race clean; yet I sincerely believe that this slim volume will find its lasting place on the shelves."--Arthur Koestler, from the Introduction.

About the Author

Fred Uhlman was born in Stuttgart in 1901 and, as an anti-Nazi lawyer, was forced to leave in 1933 for England, where he became a well-known painter.

Rollback by Robert J. Sawyer

The aliens have sent us a message, and we have responded.

Dr. Sarah Halifax decoded the first-ever radio transmission received from aliens. Thirty-eight years later, a second message is received — and Sarah, now 87, may hold the key to deciphering this one, too ... if she lives long enough.

A wealthy industrialist offers to pay for Sarah to have a rollback — a hugely expensive experimental rejuvenation procedure. She accepts on condition that Don, her husband of sixty years, gets a rollback, too. The process works for Don, making him physically twenty-five again. But in a tragic twist, the rollback fails for Sarah, leaving her in her eighties as the second message arrives.

While Don tries to deal with his newfound youth and the suddenly vast age gap between him and his wife, Sarah struggles to do again what she'd done once before: figure out what a signal from the stars contains.

Exploring morals and ethics on both human and cosmic scales, Rollback is the big new SF novel by Hugo and Nebula Award-winner Robert J. Sawyer.

"Robert J. Sawyer is just about the best science fiction writer out there these days." —The Rocky Mountain News

"One of the foremost science fiction writers of our generation." —SF Site

"A writer of boundless confidence and bold scientific extrapolation." —The New York Times

The Road by Cormac Mc Carthy

The Road (click on the title to watch the trailer of the film) is a 2006 novel by American writer Cormac McCarthy. It is a post-apocalyptic tale of a journey taken by a father and his young son over a period of several months, across a landscape blasted by an unnamed cataclysm that destroyed all civilization and, apparently, almost all life on earth. The novel was awarded the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction in 2006.

The Road follows an unnamed father and son journeying together across a grim post-apocalyptic landscape, some years after a great, unexplained cataclysm has destroyed civilization and almost all life on Earth. Realizing that they will not survive another winter in their unspecified original location, the father leads the boy south, through a desolate American landscape along a vacant highway, towards the sea, sustained only by the vague hope of finding warmth and more "good people" like them, and carrying with them only what is on their backs and what will fit into a damaged supermarket cart.

Because of falling ash, the setting is very cold and dark and the land is devoid of living vegetation. There is frequent rain or snow, and electrical storms are common. Nearly all of the few human survivors are cannibalistic tribalists and/or nomads, scavenging the detritus of city and country alike for human flesh, though that too is almost entirely depleted. Their presence is noted by their leavings, mutilated and/or decorated skulls.

Overwhelmed by this desperate and apparently hopeless situation, the boy's mother, pregnant with him at the time of the cataclysm, commits suicide some time before the story begins; the rationality and calmness of her act being her last "great gift" to the man and the boy. The father coughs blood every morning and knows he is dying, yet he struggles to protect his son from the constant threats of attack, exposure, and starvation, as well as from what he sees as the boy's innocently well-meaning, but dangerous desire to help wanderers they meet. Through much of the story, the pistol they carry, meant for protection or suicide if necessary, has only one bullet. The boy has been told to use it on himself if capture is imminent, to spare himself the horror of death at the hands of the cannibals.

In the face of these obstacles, the man and the boy have only each other (they are "each the other's world entire"). The man maintains the pretense, and the boy holds on to the real faith, that there is a core of ethics left somewhere in humanity. They repeatedly assure one another that they are "the good guys," who are "carrying the fire."

On their journey, the duo scrounge for food, encounter roving bands of cannibals, and contend with casual horrors such as a new born infant being roasted on a spit, and people being kept captive as they are slowly harvested for food. Although the vast majority of the book is written in the third person, with references to "the father" and "the son" or to "the man" and "the boy," at one paragraph only in the discussion of the journey the story is told in the first person.

Although the man and the boy eventually reach the sea, neither the climate nor availability of food has improved. Despite having succeeded in defending the boy through extreme hardship, the man has failed to find the salvation he had hoped for his son, and succumbs to his illness and dies; leaving the boy alone, though he is told that he may continue to speak to the father and that the father would still be present. Three days later, however, the grieving boy encounters a man who has been tracking the father and son. This man, who has a wife and two children of his own, brings the boy to join his family. One of the children is a girl. A brief epilogue meditates on nature and infinity in this altered environment.

Khaled Hosseini The Kite Runner.

Click on the title to watch the trailer of the excellent film by Marc Foster (2007)

In his debut novel, The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini accomplishes what very few contemporary novelists are able to do. He manages to provide an educational and eye-opening account of a country's political turmoil--in this case, Afghanistan--while also developing characters whose heartbreaking struggles and emotional triumphs resonate with readers long after the last page has been turned over. And he does this on his first try.

The Kite Runner follows the story of Amir, the privileged son of a wealthy businessman in Kabul, and Hassan, the son of Amir's father's servant. As children in the relatively stable Afghanistan of the early 1970s, the boys are inseparable. They spend idyllic days running kites and telling stories of mystical places and powerful warriors until an unspeakable event changes the nature of their relationship forever, and eventually cements their bond in ways neither boy could have ever predicted. Even after Amir and his father flee to America, Amir remains haunted by his cowardly actions and disloyalty. In part, it is these demons and the sometimes impossible quest for forgiveness that bring him back to his war-torn native land after it comes under Taliban rule. ("...I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded, not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night.")

Some of the plot's turns and twists may be somewhat implausible, but Hosseini has created characters that seem so real that one almost forgets that The Kite Runner is a novel and not a memoir. At a time when Afghanistan has been thrust into the forefront of America's collective consciousness ("people sipping lattes at Starbucks were talking about the battle for Kunduz"), Hosseini offers an honest, sometimes tragic, sometimes funny, but always heartfelt view of a fascinating land. Perhaps the only true flaw in this extraordinary novel is that it ends all too soon