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The year 1984 has come and gone, George Orwell's nightmarish vision in 1949 of the world we were becoming is timelier than ever. 1984 is the great modern classic of a "negative utopia" - a startling original and haunting novel that creates an imaginary world that is completely convincing.

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The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint : Brady Udall

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The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint : Brady Udall

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Half Apache and mostly orphaned, the adventures of Edgar Presley Mint begin on an Arizona reservation at the age of seven, when the mailman's jeep accidentally runs over his head. Shunted from the hospital to a reform school to a Mormon foster family, comedy and trouble accompany Edgar - the irresistible innocent who never truly loses heart, and whose quest for the mailman leads him to an unexpected home. This riveting picaresque novel has become an international best-seller.

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Animal Farm is a simple tale of what happens when the animals on Mr Jones's farm get rid of the owner and take the farm over themselves. Their revolution begins with the best of intentions, but is undermined by corruption and greed, a chilling allegory of the events that took place when Communism was established.

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Far in the future, the World Controllers have created the ideal society. Through clever use of genetic engineering, brainwashing and recreational sex and drugs all its members are happy consumers. Bernard Marx seems alone harbouring an ill-defined longing to break free. A visit to one of the few remaining Savage Reservations where the old, imperfect life still continues, may be the cure for his distress... Huxley's ingenious fantasy of the future sheds a blazing light on the present and is considered to be his most enduring masterpiece.

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A plane crashes on a desert island and the only survivors, a group of schoolboys, assemble on the beach and wait to be rescued. By day they inhabit a land of bright fantastic birds and dark blue seas, but at night their dreams are haunted by the image of a terrifying beast. As the boys' delicate sense of order fades, so their childish dreams are transformed into something more primitive, and their behaviour starts to take on a murderous, savage significance.

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Offred is a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead. She may leave the home of the Commander and his wife once a day to walk to food markets whose signs are now pictures instead of words because women are no longer allowed to read. She must lie on her back once a month and pray that the Commander makes her pregnant, because in an age of declining births, Offred and the other Handmaids are valued only if their ovaries are viable. Offred can remember the days before, when she lived and made love with her husband Luke; when she played with and protected her daughter; when she had a job, money of her own, and access to knowledge. But all of that is gone now.... Funny, unexpected, horrifying, and altogether convincing, The Handmaid's Tale is at once scathing satire, dire warning, and literary tour de force.

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Stopmouth and his family know of no other life than the daily battle to survive. To live, they must hunt rival species, or negotiate flesh-trade with those who crave meat of the freshest human kind. It is a savage, desperate existence. And for Stopmouth, considered slow-witted hunt-fodder by his tribe, the future looks especially bleak. But then, on the day he is callously betrayed by his brother, a strange and beautiful woman falls from the sky. It is a moment that will change his destiny, and that of all humanity, forever.

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The Knife of Never Letting Go : Patrick Ness

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The Knife of Never Letting Go : Patrick Ness

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Imagine you're the only boy in a town of men. And you can hear everything they think. And they can hear everything you think. Imagine you don't fit in with their plans... Todd Hewitt is just one month away from the birthday that will make him a man. But his town has been keeping secrets from him. Secrets that are going to force him to run.

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The Time Traveller's Wife : Audrey Niffenegger

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The Time Traveller's Wife : Audrey Niffenegger

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A dazzling novel in the most untraditional fashion, this is the remarkable story of Henry DeTamble, a dashing, adventuresome librarian who travels involuntarily through time, and Clare Abshire, an artist whose life takes a natural sequential course. Henry and Clare's passionate love affair endures across a sea of time and captures the two lovers in an impossibly romantic trap, and it is Audrey Niffenegger's cinematic storytelling that makes the novel's unconventional chronology so vibrantly triumphant.

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In 1918 Ernest Hemingway went to war. He volunteered for ambulance service in Italy, was wounded and twice decorated. Out of his experience came A Farewell to Arms . Hemingway's description of war is unforgettable. He recreates the fear, the comradeship, the courage of his young American volunteer, and the men and women he meets in Italy, with total conviction. But A Farewell to Arms is not only a novel of war. In it Hemingway has also created a love story of immense drama and uncompromising passion.

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A Thousand Splendid Suns : Khaled Hosseini

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A Thousand Splendid Suns : Khaled Hosseini

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Born a generation apart and with very different ideas about love and family, Mariam and Laila are two women brought jarringly together by war, by loss and by fate. As they endure the ever escalating dangers around them - in their home as well as in the streets of Kabul - they come to form a bond that makes them both sisters and mother-daughter to each other, and that will ultimately alter the course not just of their own lives but of the next generation. With heart-wrenching power and suspense, Hosseini shows how a woman's love for her family can move her to shocking and heroic acts of self-sacrifice, and that in the end it is love, or even the memory of love, that is often the key to survival.

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On the hottest day of the summer of 1934, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis sees her sister Cecilia strip off her clothes and plunge into the fountain in the garden of their country house. Watching her is Robbie Turner, her childhood friend who, like Cecilia, has recently come down from Cambridge. By the end of that day, the lives of all three will have been changed for ever. Robbie and Cecilia will have crossed a boundary they had not even imagined at its start, and will have become victims of the younger girl's imagination. Briony will have witnessed mysteries, and committed a crime for which she will spend the rest of her life trying to atone.

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Published to international critical and popular acclaim, this intensely romantic yet stunningly realistic novel spans three generations and the unimaginable gulf between the First World War and the present. As the young Englishman Stephen Wraysford passes through a tempestuous love affair with Isabelle Azaire in France and enters the dark, surreal world beneath the trenches of No Man's Land, Sebastian Faulks creates a world of fiction that is as tragic as A Farewell to Arms and as sensuous as The English Patient . Crafted from the ruins of war and the indestructibility of love, Birdsong is a novel that will be read and marveled at for years to come.

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Captain Corelli's Mandolin : Louis de Bernieres

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Captain Corelli's Mandolin : Louis de Bernieres

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In 1941, Captain Antonio Corelli, a young Italian officer is posted to the Greek Island of Cephallonia as part of the occupying forces. His aim is to have a peaceful war and he soon becomes popular with the islanders especially the doctor's daughter, Pelagia. But she has a fiance who is away fighting the war ...A stunning novel of joy and sorrow - not to be missed.

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Two rural families - the Pickles and the Lambs - flee to the city after separate catastrophes. They find themselves sharing a great, breathing, shuddering joint called Cloudstreet, where they begin their lives again from scratch - and for twenty years, they roister and rankle, laugh and curse until the roof over their heads becomes a home for their hearts.

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A soldier wounded in the Civil War, Inman turns his back on the carnage of the battlefield and begins the treacherous journey home to Cold Mountain, and to Ada, the woman he loved before the war began. As Inman attempts to make his way across the mountains, through the devastated landscape of a soon-to-be-defeated South, Ada struggles to make a living from the land her once-wealthy father left when he died. Neither knows if the other is still alive.

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Church minister Stephen Kumalo receives a letter that means he must leave his village and travel to Johannesburg, where his sister is ill and his son is lost. Kumalo is worried about what he will find there - but the situation is much worse than he could have imagined.

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A wonderfully nostalgic story about one boy's determination to follow his dreams from the award-winning author of Goodnight Mr Tom. Amid the rubble of post-war Britain, Ralph is entranced by the theatre. He loves seeing the performances, talking to the actors, the buzz of the audience, and the corridors and dressing rooms backstage. But how can a working-class boy achieve his dream when there is no opportunity for theatre training?

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Orphaned Jane Eyre endures an unhappy childhood, hated by her aunt and cousins and then sent to comfortless Lowood School. But life there improves and Jane stays on as a teacher, though she still longs for love and friendship. At Mr Rochester's house, where she goes to work as a governess, she hopes she might have found them - until she learns the terrible secret of the attic.

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This story is a rare and utterly engaging experience. It tells the extraordinary story of a geisha -summoning up a quarter century from 1929 to the post-war years of Japan's dramatic history, and opening a window into a half-hidden world of eroticism and enchantment, exploitation and degradation. A young peasant girl is sold as servant and apprentice to a renowned geisha house. She tells her story many years later from the Waldorf Astoria in New York. Her memoirs conjure up the perfection and the ugliness of life behind rice-paper screens, where young girls learn the arts of geisha - dancing and singing, how to wind the kimono, how to walk and pour tea, and how to beguile the land's most powerful men.

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After the trouble starts and the soldiers arrive on Matilda's island, there comes a time when all the white people have left. Only Mr Watts remains, and he wears a red nose and pulls his wife around on a trolley; the kids call him Popeye behind his back. But there is no one else to teach them their lessons, and no books left to learn from - except for Mr Watts's battered copy of Great Expectations , 'by my friend Mr Dickens'. As Mr Watts stands before the class and reads, Dickens's hero, Pip, starts to come alive in Matilda's imagination. Soon he has become as real to her as her own family, and the greatest friendship of her life has begun. But Matilda is not the only one who believes in Pip. And on an island at war, the power of the imagination can be a dangerously provocative thing. A dazzling achievement, Mister Pip is a love song to the power of storytelling. It is about belonging and losing one's way, about love, grief and memory, and it shows how books can change our lives forever.

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On a June morning in 1923, Clarissa Dalloway is preparing for a party and remembering her past. Elsewhere in London, Septimus Smith is suffering from shell-shock and on the brink of madness. Their days interweave and their lives converge as the party reaches its glittering climax. Here, Virginia Woolf perfected the interior monologue and the novel's lyricism and accessibility have made it one of her most popular works.

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A twelve-year-old boy writes an essay as part of his homework, and uncovers a secret from World War II. This triggers a chain of events which rips a close community apart. It is Auckland, 1956. New Zealand was spared the destruction which ravaged Europe and Asia but bitter memories and old enmities remain. The war may be over but, as the boy discovers, it is not yet done with.

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Returning to England after the war, Jamaican Gilbert Joseph is treated very differently now that he is no longer in an RAF uniform. Joined by his wife Hortense, he rekindles a friendship with Queenie who takes in Jamaican lodgers. Can their dreams of a better life in England overcome the prejudice they face?

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In 1954, a fisherman is found dead in the nets of his boat, and a local Japanese-American man is charged with his murder. In the course of his trial, it becomes clear that what is at stake is more than one man's guilt.

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It is 1939. Nazi Germany. The country is holding its breath. Death has never been busier, and will become busier still. Liesel Meminger and her younger brother are being taken by their mother to live with a foster family outside Munich. Liesel's father was taken away on the breath of a single, unfamiliar word - Kommunist - and Liesel sees the fear of a similar fate in her mother's eyes. On the journey, Death visits the young boy, and notices Liesel. It will be the first of many near encounters. By her brother's graveside, Liesel's life is changed when she picks up a single object, partially hidden in the snow. It is The Gravedigger's Handbook, left there by accident, and it is her first act of book thievery. So begins a love affair with books and words, as Liesel, with the help of her accordion-playing foster father, learns to read. Soon she is stealing books from Nazi book-burnings, the mayor's wife's library, wherever there are books to be found. But these are dangerous times. When Liesel's foster family hides a Jewish fist-fighter in their basement, Liesel's world is both opened up, and closed down. THE BOOK THIEF is a story about the power of words to make worlds. In superbly crafted writing that burns with intensity, award-winning author Markus Zusak has given us one of the most enduring stories of our time.

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Set in the deep American south between the wars, this is the classic tale of Celie, a young poor black girl. Raped repeatedly by her father, she loses two children and then is married off to a man who treats her no better than a slave. She is separated from her sister Nettie and dreams of becoming like the glamorous Shug Avery, a singer and rebellious black woman who has taken charge of her own destiny. Gradually Celie discovers the support of women that enables her to leave the past behind and begin a new life.

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'They all broke the rules. They all crossed into forbidden territory. They all tampered with the laws that lay down who should be loved, and how. And how much.' This is the story of Rahel and Estha, twins growing up among the banana vats and peppercorns of their blind grandmother's factory, and amid scenes of political turbulence in Kerala. Armed only with the innocence of youth, they fashion a childhood in the shade of the wreck that is their family: their lonely, lovely mother, their beloved Uncle Chacko (pickle baron, radical Marxist, bottom-pincher) and their sworn enemy, Baby Kochamma (ex-nun, incumbent grand-aunt). Arundhati Roy's Booker Prize-winning novel was the literary sensation of the 1990s: a story anchored to anguish but fuelled by wit and magic.

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Jay Gatsby had once loved beautiful, spoiled Daisy Buchanan, then lost her to a rich boy. Now, mysteriously wealthy, he is ready to risk everything to woo her back.
A social satire and a milestone in 20th century literature, 'The Great Gatsby' peels away the layers of the glamorous twenties in the U.S. to display the coldness and cruelty at its heart.

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The Kite Runner is a novel about friendship, betrayal, and the price of loyalty. It is about the bonds between fathers and sons, and the power of fathers over sons - their love, their sacrifices, and their lies.

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The Poisonwood Bible : Barbara Kingsolver

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The Poisonwood Bible : Barbara Kingsolver

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In 1959, Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist, takes his four young daughters, his wife, and his mission to the Belgian Congo -- a place, he is sure, where he can save needy souls. But the seeds they plant bloom in tragic ways within this complex culture. Set against one of the most dramatic political events of the twentieth century -- the Congo's fight for independence from Belgium and its devastating consequences -- here is New York Times-bestselling author Barbara Kingslover's beautiful, heartbreaking, and unforgettable epic that chronicles the disintegration of family and a nation.

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When he falls ill on his way home from school, fifteen-year-old Michael Berg is rescued by Hanna, a woman twice his age. In time she becomes his lover--then she inexplicably disappears. When Michael next sees her, he is a young law student, and she is on trial for a hideous crime. As he watches her refuse to defend her innocence, Michael gradually realizes that Hanna may be guarding a secret she considers more shameful than murder.

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Lily has grown up believing she accidentally killed her mother when she was four. She not only has her own memory of holding the gun, but her father's account of the event. Now fourteen, she yearns for her mother, and for forgiveness. Living on a peach farm in South Carolina with her father, she has only one friend: Rosaleen, a black servant whose sharp exterior hides a tender heart. South Carolina in the sixties is a place where segregation is still considered a cause worth fighting for. When racial tension explodes one summer afternoon, and Rosaleen is arrested and beaten, Lily is compelled to act. Fugitives from justice and from Lily's harsh and unyielding father, they follow a trail left by the woman who died ten years before. Finding sanctuary in the home of three beekeeping sisters, Lily starts a journey as much about her understanding of the world, as about the mystery surrounding her mother.

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Okonowo is the greatest warrior alive. His fame has spread like a bushfire in West Africa and he is one of the most powerful men of his clan. But he also has a fiery temper. Determined not to be like his father, he refuses to show weakness to anyone - even if the only way he can master his feelings is with his fists. When outsiders threaten the traditions of his clan, Okonowo takes violent action. Will the great man's dangerous pride eventually destroy him?

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When the Hipchicks Went to War : Pamela Rushby

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When the Hipchicks Went to War : Pamela Rushby

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When the Hipchicks Went to War is a story of sixteen-year-old Kathy, a young go-go dancer who signs up with an entertainment troupe to perform for Australian troops in Vietnam. But Kathy and her friends soon find that the reality of war is no song and dance, as they dive into the unspeakable horrors of war.

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Lucy Honeychurch, a young woman, is travelling abroad for the first time with her cousin Charlotte. On her return to England, in her relationships with her cousin, the unconventional Emersons and her supercilious fiance Cecil, Lucy is torn between lingering Victorian proprieties and the spontaneous promptings of her heart.

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Emma Woodhouse is beautiful, clever and rich. She likes to arrange marriages between her friends and neighbours in the village of Highbury. However, Emma makes a lot of mistakes and causes more problems than happy marriages and almost loses her own chance of love.

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A novel of love lost and regained in Regency England. Anne Elliott's snobbish family persuaded her not to marry the man she loved, Frederick Wentworth, a young naval captain. Eight years later, when their paths cross again, Anne realises her mistake and wonders if she will have a second chance at love.

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A portrayal of family life in the genteel rural society of Regency England, and the initial misunderstandings and later mutual enlightenment between Elizabeth Bennet and the haughty Mister Darcy.

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Two sisters, Marianne and Elinor Dashwood, are left with little money or status on the death of their father and move with their mother and youngest sister to a humble cottage on the Devonshire estate of a rich relation. Here the sisters fall in love, suffer disappointment and learn to achieve a balance between passion and prudence.

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Tess of the D'Urbervilles : Thomas Hardy

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Tess of the D'Urbervilles : Thomas Hardy

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The story of a young woman who tries to escape the poverty of her background by claiming connection with the aristocratic D'Urberville family, but is betrayed by the double standards of the men who desire her.

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In the still of a snow-covered morning in upstate New York, a girl out riding her horse is hit by a 40-ton truck. Though horribly injured, both thirteen-year-old Grace Maclean and her horse Pilgrim survive. But the impact on their lives is devastating. Grace's mother Annie hears about a man called Tom Booker, a 'whisperer' who is said to have the gift of healing troubled horses. Abandoning her job, Annie sets off across the continent with Grace and Pilgrim to find him. Under the massive Montana sky, all their lives are changed for ever.

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How far can love endure? Noah Calhoun has just returned from World War Two. Attempting to escape the ghosts of battle, he tries to concentrate on restoring an old plantation home to its former glory. And yet he is haunted by images of the beautiful girl he met there fourteen years before, a girl who captured his heart like no other. But when these distant memories begin to slide into reality, the passion that had lain still is ignited once more. Though so much is in their way, the miraculous force of their love refuses to fade.

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Every weekend, in basements and parking lots across the country, young men with good white-collar jobs fight each other barehanded. Then they go back to their jobs with black eyes and loose teeth and the sense that they can handle anything. Fight Club is the invention of Tyler Durden, projectionist, waiter, and dark, anarchic genius.

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The son of a zookeeper, Pi Patel has an encyclopedic knowledge of animal behavior and a fervent love of stories. When Pi is sixteen, his family emigrates from India to North America aboard a Japanese cargo ship, along with their zoo animals bound for new homes. The ship sinks. Pi finds himself alone in a lifeboat, his only companions a hyena, an orangutan, a wounded zebra, and Richard Parker, a 450-pound Bengal tiger. Soon the tiger has dispatched all but Pi, whose fear, knowledge, and cunning allow him to coexist with Richard Parker for 227 days while lost at sea. When they finally reach the coast of Mexico, Richard Parker flees to the jungle, never to be seen again. The Japanese authorities who interrogate Pi refuse to believe his story and press him to tell them "the truth." After hours of coercion, Pi tells a second story, a story much less fantastical, much more conventional--but is it more true?

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No Country for Old Men : Cormac McCarthy

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No Country for Old Men : Cormac McCarthy

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Llewelyn Moss, hunting antelope near the Rio Grande, stumbles upon a transaction gone horribly wrong. Finding bullet-ridden bodies, several kilos of heroin, and a caseload of cash, he faces a choice - leave the scene as he found it, or cut the money and run. Choosing the latter, he knows, will change everything. And so begins a terrifying chain of events, in which each participant seems determined to answer the question that one asks another: how does a man decide in what order to abandon his life?

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Perfume: The Story of a Murderer : Patrick Suskind

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Perfume: The Story of a Murderer : Patrick Suskind

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In the slums of eighteenth-century France, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is born with one sublime gift - an absolute sense of smell. As a boy, he apprentices himself to a prominent perfumer, but Grenouille is not satisfied to stop there, and he becomes obsessed with capturing the smells of objects such as brass doorknobs and fresh-cut wood. Then one day he catches a hint of a scent that will drive him on an ever-more-terrifying quest to create the ultimate perfume - the scent of a beautiful young virgin.

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Margaret Rose Bennett, like her elder sister, Elizabeth, was named after the two English princesses. But Elizabeth is dead, and Margaret Rose still living, searching and reaching out for life and its meaning. And against the frankly odd, strained and curiously English household she inhabits in a New Zealand city, it is hard to make out the truth. So Margaret abandons what her parents think is right: learning English history, the French language, listening to comedy shows on the World Service and returning home on the 9.30 tram and maps out a course of her own. She studies Maori at University, makes friends with the wayward Emily (daughter of the soon to be Prime Minister of New Zealand) and shy, independent Prudence. As a trio they study hard for their degrees, work by day at the local Government offices and by night sing, drink and laugh with the local Maori people - and fall in love. A new world, an enchanting world, and one with an underbelly of struggle, colour, passion and even violence. Far removed from the closed, ordered life of Margaret Rose's family, but perhaps not so detached from their own, secret history...
Here is an extraordinary, poetic novel of a society trapped in a time of its own, undercut by a people that live and breathe with a vigour that bubbles and burst through the silent surface.

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The story of a good though damaged man and his less than virtuous sister. As their childhood closeness unravels, Alice moves into her career in science (she's a mycologist), while Gordon descents into vagrancy and silence. For more than thirty years they do not meet. Then a young man appears at Alice's door, claiming a relationship she never knew she had. As he becomes part of her carefully guarded world, she cautiously begins to reveal the past. But is she telling him everything? Jealousy, ambition and love shape the fates of Alice and Gordon in this story of loyalty and family ties.

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Caught in the middle of the struggle between two great Maori clans, Simeon, grandson of Bulibasha and Ramona, struggles with his own feelings and loyalties as the battles rage.

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Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield : Katherine Mansfield

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Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield : Katherine Mansfield

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The 73 three short stories and 15 unfinished fragments contained in this volume represent the whole range of Katherine Mansfield's writing. Contemporary critics compared her to Chekhov in her treatment of apparently trifling incidents and her symbolic use of objects to convey powerful atmosphere.

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When Celia Inverarity, aged seventeen, is found brutally murdered in a secluded West Auckland park one Sunday afternoon, Paul Prior, her English teacher and mentor, is suspected of being her murderer. Celia's death and the violence which follows send Prior back to examine the past - which proves as secret as his father's den in the old poison shed. Eventually the murderer is exposed, but not before a family has been split apart and old wounds revealed. In My Father's Den is Maurice Gee's third novel and was first published in 1972.

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When a massive suicide bomb explodes at a London soccer match a woman loses both her four-year-old son and her husband. But the bombing is only the beginning. In a voice alive with grief, compassion, and startling humor, Incendiary is a stunning debut of one ordinary life blown apart by terror.

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A powerful story of a Maori family where everyone is a victim, until the strength and vision of one of them transcends the brutality of their existence and leads the way to new possibilities.

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It is a time of fear and confusion. Dramatic events threaten the marae. Potiki is Patricia Grace's best-selling novel about a coastal community in danger. It is a work of spellbinding power that weaves myths of older times into the political realities of today.

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Inspired, as was the original, by Dylan Thomas's Under Milkwood, Whanau II assembles a cast of characters in the rural Maori community of Waituhi: Rongo Mahana, alone in a landscape altered by Pakeha values; Miro Mananui fighting to retain her land; Andrew Whatu, who must leave the village to follow his ambitions; Mattie Jones, who came back to the village defeated by the city; and Nanny Paora, who escapes the present by living in the past. Ihimaera reveals the tensions between traditional and modern, rural and urban that lie within modern Maori society.

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What Becomes of the Broken Hearted? : Alan Duff

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What Becomes of the Broken Hearted? : Alan Duff

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The raw and powerful sequel to

Once Were Warriors.
It is six years since Jake's daughter Grace hanged herself. Jake's wife, Beth, has left him, his son Nig was killed in a gangland fight - his only consolations are drink and his memories. His daughter Polly is determined to escape the violence that is destroying the Maoris. But can Jake, too, redeem himself?

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One windy spring day in the Chilterns Joe Rose's calm, organised life is shattered by a ballooning accident. The afternoon could have ended in mere tragedy, but for his brief meeting with Jed Parry. Unknown to Joe, something passes between them - something that gives birth in Parry to an obsession so powerful that it will test to the limits Joe's beloved scientific rationalism, threaten the love of his wife Clarissa and drive him to the brink of murder and madness.

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Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close : Jonathan Safran Foer

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Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close : Jonathan Safran Foer

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Nine-year-old Oskar Schell has embarked on an urgent, secret mission that will take him through the five boroughs of New York. His goal is to find the lock that matches a mysterious key that belonged to his father, who died in the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11. This seemingly impossible task will bring Oskar into contact with survivors of all sorts on an exhilarating, affecting, often hilarious, and ultimately healing journey.

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One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest : Ken Kesey

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One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest : Ken Kesey

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Boisterous, ribald, and ultimately shattering, Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is the seminal novel of the 1960s that has left an indelible mark on the literature of our time. Here is the unforgettable story of a mental ward and its inhabitants, especially the tyrannical Big Nurse Ratched and Randle Patrick McMurphy, the brawling, fun-loving new inmate who resolves to oppose her. We see the struggle through the eyes of Chief Bromden, the seemingly mute half-Indian patient who witnesses and understands McMurphy's heroic attempt to do battle with the awesome powers that keep them all imprisoned.

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To five-year-old-Jack, Room is the world. It's where he was born, it's where he and his Ma eat and sleep and play and learn. At night, his Ma shuts him safely in the wardrobe, where he is meant to be asleep when Old Nick visits. Room is home to Jack, but to Ma it's the prison where she has been held for seven years. Through her fierce love for her son, she has created a life for him in this eleven-by-eleven-foot space. But with Jack's curiosity building alongside her own desperation, she knows that Room cannot contain either much longer.

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After Zoe and Max's last attempt to conceive fails tragically, their marriage breaks apart. When Zoe falls in love again and considers having a family, she remembers that there are still frozen embryos that were never used. But who do they really belong to? An honest and moving story of contemporary relationships and the consequences when love and desire collide with science and the law.

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After Zoe and Max's last attempt to conceive fails tragically, their marriage breaks apart. When Zoe falls in love again and considers having a family, she remembers that there are still frozen embryos that were never used. But who do they really belong to?

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I was supposed to be having the time of my life. When Esther Greenwood wins an internship on a New York fashion magazine in 1953, she is elated, believing she will finally realise her dream to become a writer. But in between the cocktail parties and piles of manuscripts, Esther's life begins to slide out of control. She finds herself spiraling into depression and eventually a suicide attempt, as she grapples with difficult relationships and a society which refuses to take women's aspirations seriously. The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath's only novel, was originally published in 1963 under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. The novel is partially based on Plath's own life and has become a modern classic. The Bell Jar has been celebrated for its darkly funny and a razor sharp portrait of 1950s society and has sold millions of copies worldwide.

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Meursault leads an apparently unremarkable bachelor life in Algiers until he commits an act of violence. His response to the incident challenges the fundamental values of society.

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Born in a South Africa divided by racism and hatred, little six-year-old Peekay learns that small can beat big. Armed with this knowledge, he resolves to take on the injustices of his country, and sets his heart on becoming the welterweight champion of the world. Peekay starts to take boxing lessons, makes new friends, collects cacti and plays the piano. Above all, he learns to think with his head and then with his heart. He discovers that nothing can defeat the determination to be true to yourself: that this is the power of one.

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A memoir of growing up in New York in the 1930s and in Ireland in the 1940s. McCourt tells of extreme hardship and suffering, in Brooklyn tenements and Limerick slums - too many children, too little money, his mother barely coping as his father's drinking bouts brought the family close to disaster.

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'You are here for the rest of your life. Do you understand? You are not leaving Iran. You are here until you die.' Betty Mahmoody and her husband, Dr Sayyed Bozorg Mahmoody ('Moody'), came to Iran from the USA to meet Moody's family. With them was their four-year-old daughter, Mahtob. Appalled by the squalor of their living conditions, horrified by what she saw of a country where women are merely chattels and Westerners are despised, Betty soon became desperate to return to the States. But Moody, and his often vicious family, had other plans. Mother and daughter became prisoners of an alien culture, hostages of an increasingly tyrannical and violent man. Betty began to try to arrange an escape. Evading Moody's sinister spy network, she secretly met sympathisers opposed to Khomeini's savage regime. But every scheme that was suggested to her meant leaving Mahtob behind for ever...

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In 2052, New Zealand has been renamed The Republic and has separated itself from a plague-ridden globe and all approaching boats, aircraft or refugees are shot on sight. Society is rigidly divided and individuals deviate from their assigned roles at their peril. When Adam Forde insists on his right to independent thought and action, he is imprisoned: his sentence is to become the participant in an experiment with a new brand of artificial intelligence.

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A darkly comic portrait of human life and possibility. Quoyle is a hopeless hack journalist working in New York. When his two-timing wife dies in a road accident, he retreats to his ancestral home on the coast of Newfoundland where he must confront the unpredictable forces of nature and society.

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They carried malaria tablets, love letters, 28-pound mine detectors, dope, illustrated bibles, each other. And if they made it home alive, they carried unrelenting images of a nightmarish war that history is only beginning to absorb. Since its first publication, The Things They Carried has become an unparalleled Vietnam testament, a classic work of American literature, and a profound study of men at war that illuminates the capacity, and the limits, of the human heart and soul. The Things They Carried depicts the men of Alpha Company: Jimmy Cross, Henry Dobbins, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Norman Bowker, Kiowa, and the character Tim O’Brien, who has survived his tour in Vietnam to become a father and writer at the age of forty-three.

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Nick McDonell's Twelve created a sensation around the world, establishing its seventeen-year-old author as one of the new and important voices of his generation. The book sold over 300,000 copies worldwide and was published in twenty-four countries. Like Catcher in the Rye and Less Than Zero , Twelve captures the soul of a generation. It is a book for the new millennium, a chronicle of urban adolescence that created an international sensation. Set in Manhattan between Christmas and New Year's Eve, it tells an inexorable tale that ranges from the housing project of Harlem to the penthouses of Park Avenue. McDonell introduces us to White Mike, a seventeen-year-old drug dealer, and the kids he encounters - Chris and Claude and Hunter and Jessica with their lives of extraordinary privilege. The story he tells is unputdownable. And just when we think nothing can surprise us, Twelve races to a shocking finale.

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In one of the most memorable novels of recent years, Kazuo Ishiguro imagines the lives of a group of students growing up in a darkly skewered version of contemporary England. Narrated by Kathy, now 31, Never Let Me Go hauntingly dramatises her attempts to come to terms with her childhood at the seemingly idyllic Hailsham School, and with the fate that has always awaited her and her closest friends in the wider world. A story of love, friendship and memory, Never Let Me Go is charged throughout with a sense of the fragility of life.

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Prisoner of war, optometrist, time-traveller - these are the life roles of Billy Pilgrim, hero of this miraculously moving, bitter and funny story of innocence faced with apocalypse. Slaughterhouse 5 is one of the world's great anti-war books. Centering on the infamous fire-bombing of Dresden in the Second World War, Billy Pilgrim's odyssey through time reflects the journey of our own fractured lives as we search for meaning in what we are afraid to know.

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Set in provincial, pre-1940 New Zealand, this novel explores the Withers family and in particular Daphne. When one of Daphne's sisters, Francie, dies at the rubbish dump where the children search for treasure, the crisis leads Daphne to a mental asylum where she is given shock treatment.

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In a house haunted by memories, the past is everywhere . . . As darkness falls, a man caught in a snowstorm is forced to shelter at the strange, grim house Wuthering Heights. It is a place he will never forget. There he will come to learn the story of Cathy- how she was forced to choose between her well-meaning husband and the dangerous man she had loved since she was young. How her choice led to betrayal and terrible revenge - and continues to torment those in the present. How love can transgress authority, convention, even death. And how desire can kill.

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If someone hurts your sister and you're any kind of man, you seek revenge, right? When Mikey's sister claims a boy assaulted her, his world begins to fall apart. If your brother's accused of a terrible crime but says he didn't do it, you defend him, don't you? When Ellie's brother is charged with the offence, her world begins to unravel. When Mikey and Ellie meet, two worlds collide.

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Susie Salmon speaks to us from heaven, because she was murdered when she was 14 years old by a man who lived in the same neighbourhood. Over the years, her friends and siblings grow up, fall in love and do the things she has never had the chance to do. But life is not quite finished with Susie yet.

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Meet Ed Kennedy - cab driving prodigy, pathetic card player and useless at sex. He lives in the suburbs, shares coffee with his dog, the Doorman, and he's in nervous-love with Audrey. His life is one of peaceful routine and incompetence - until he inadvertently stops a bank robbery. That's when the first ace turns up. That's when Ed becomes the messenger. Chosen to care, he makes his way through town, helping and hurting (where necessary) until only one question remains. Who's behind Ed's mission?

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I am the space between my thighs, daylight shining through. Lia and Cassie were best friends. But something went wrong and Cassie changed. Now Cassie is dead and Lia has thirty-three unanswered calls on her phone, thirty-three messages from her ex-best friend, all sent the day she died. How did she die? Why did she cut herself off? While Lia searches for answers, she drives herself relentlessly on her own path to destruction - to be thin, strong, in control. And completely empty. Wintergirls is a powerful but intimate story of one girl's chilling descent into the all-consuming vortex of anorexia.

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A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don't know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food--and each other.

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