Doris Lessing - The Grass is singing -1950 -240p

Born in 1919 in Persia. Her family moved to the British colony of Southern Rhodesia (modern Zimbabwe) in 1925, to live a rough life farming maize
She was married twice (and twice divorced) and had three children. Her second husband was Gottfried Lessing, a German emigrant. Her first novel, The Grass Is Singing, was published in London in 1949, after she had moved to Europe, where she has been living ever since.
The Grass is singing
The Grass is Singing" is at once a simple story and a complex psychological and social analysis. It is a commentary on race relations in imperial Rhodesia, and an exploration of the timeless dichotomy of culture and nature.

The book is perhaps most interesting when the author describes the ideology of white colonists in Africa. In particular, the idea that extreme racism develops out of a need to justify economic exploitation is poignantly posed. It is not that whites oppress blacks because they hate them, rather they hate them because they have to oppress them and deny their human worth to maintain their standard of living. Thus, newcomers from Britain must be taught how to deal with and feel about the natives, and poor whites are despised because they seem to blur the color lines.

Harper Lee - To Kill a Mockingbird - 1960 - 300p

Nelle Harper Lee was born on April 28, 1926. Lee published her first and only novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, in 1960, after a two-year period of revising and rewriting under the guidance of her editor, Tay Hohoff, of the J. B. Lippincott Company. To Kill a Mockingbird won the 1961 Pulitzer Prize, despite mixed critical reviews. The novel was highly popular, selling more than fifteen million copies. Though she delved into her own experiences as a child in Monroeville, Lee intended for the book to impart the sense of any small Deep South town and the universal characteristics of people everywhere.
To Kill a Mockingbird
Set in the small Southern town of Maycomb, Alabama, during the Depression, To Kill a Mockingbird follows three years in the life of 8-year-old Scout Finch, her brother, Jem, and their father, Atticus--three years punctuated by the arrest and eventual trial of a young black man accused of raping a white woman. Though her story explores big themes, Harper Lee chooses to tell it through the eyes of a child. The result is a tough and tender novel of race, class, justice, and the pain of growing up.

Colin Higgins - Harold and Maude - 1971 - 110p

While a film student at UCLA, writer/director Colin Higgins made a short subject for his master's thesis. That short was later expanded into the 1970 feature film Harold and Maude, which also represented Higgins' debut as a producer. Combining Higgins' two favorite movie elements, slapstick comedy and sudden death, Harold and Maude was a box-office failure but an almost instantaneous cult success. Five years later, Higgins scored his first tangible movie hit, Silver Streak (1975), which characteristically used a suspense-film plotline upon which to mount several first-rate comic sequences. The same formula was applied to Higgins' next moneymaker, Foul Play (1978). Shortly after serving as producer and screenwriter for Out on a Limb, Colin Higgins died of AIDS at the age of 47.
Harold and Maude
While Harold is part of a society where he can have no importance and no meaning, Maude has survived against totalitarianism. Against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, Harold can only feel significant by dying. Maude, on the other hand, is a fictionalizer and a dreamer. She imagines beauty where there is none, believes in the innate goodness of people (but not the State), and practices what she calls her own individual revolution. Her backstory is only hinted in the film. She tells Harold at one point about Alfred Dreyfus seeing fantastic birds on Devil's Island and finding out later that they were only seagulls. She says that to her they would always be fantastic birds.

Marlo Morgan Mutant Message Down Under 208 p.

From Publishers Weekly
Morgan's much-hyped first novel, a fictionalized account of a "walkabout" she took in the Outback with a group of Aborigines, gains from the use of authentic detail, although the storytelling is hindered by the author's heavy New Age agenda and incessant cultural proselytizing. A 50-ish alternative health practitioner from the American Midwest, Morgan was working with underprivileged Aborigine youths in the inner cities of Australia when a group of Aborigines offered her a chance to learn firsthand about their culture. Morgan's account of the tribe's customs, healing methods, food-finding tactics, etc. is absorbing, and her willingness to forgo Western luxuries and to relish the experience is courageous and touching. Less compellingly, the author claims that she was "chosen" by the Aborigines to tell the rest of humanity that the so-called "real people" are refusing to reproduce because of the ravages of Western civilization, and that Westerners have a limited time to clean up their act. Morgan's rudimentary writing skills are stretched to the limit, and she lessens the power of her story and its egalitarian lessons by adopting the perspective that Western culture is innately inferior to the naturalistic beliefs of the Aborigines.

Charles Dickens Oliver Twist 490 p

Oliver Twist (1838) is Charles Dickens' second novel. The book was originally published in Bentley's Miscellany as a serial, in monthly installments that began appearing in February 1837 and continued through April 1839. George Cruikshank provided one steel etching per month to illustrate each installment.^[1]

Oliver Twist is the first English novel with a child protagonist,^[2] and is also notable for Dickens' unromantic portrayal of criminals and their sordid lives.^[3] The book's subtitle, The Parish Boy's Progress alludes to Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress and also to a pair of popular 18th-century caricature series by William Hogarth, "A Rake's Progress" and "A Harlot's Progress."^[4]

An early example of the social novel, the book calls the public's attention to various contemporary social evils, including the workhouse, child labour and the recruitment of children as criminals. Dickens mocks the hypocrisies of the time by surrounding the novel's serious themes with sarcasm and dark humour. The novel may have been inspired by the story of Robert Blincoe, an orphan whose account of his hardships as a child laborer in a cotton mill was widely read in the 1830s.

Oliver Twist has been the subject of numerous film and television adaptations, and is the basis for a highly successful British musical, Oliver!. from wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

(Polanski's latest version was excellent)