A teenage novel about friendship, love and the importance of overcoming loss, grief and suffering. After moving to a boarding school in Alabama, Miles manages to make new friends, discovers the vices of teenage life and falls in love with Alaska – a girl seemingly carrying some emotional trauma. One day Alaska receives a phone […]
A young-adult novel on the loss of innocence, isolation and alienation, morality, mental health, sexual confusion, youth and the painfulness of growing up. The Catcher in the Rye tells a story of teenage frustration and the way 17-year-old Holden perceives the world. Expelled from his private school, he goes to New York City, wandering the […]
A collection of Wilde’s tales of true beauty, the celebration of loyalty, selfless love, wit and aestheticism published in The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888) and A House of Pomegranates (1891). In “The Selfish Giant”, a giant chases children playing in his garden off and builds a high wall to keep them out. From […]
An allegorical novel on civilization and savagery, the power of religion, identity, and youth. A group of young boys survive a plane crash and find themselves on an uninhabited island. They quickly establish a governmental structure, rules, and order and elect one boy as chief. However, not long after conflicts erupt, their group splits in […]
An autobiographical coming-of-age novel on the dangers of religious enthusiasm and the power of love. Jeanette grows up within a fundamentalist Christian family. Her adoptive mother dominates her life educating her at home in isolation until a letter from the government arrives – ordering her mother to send her daughter to school. Jeanette struggles in […]
A story about religion, struggle for survival and the relativity of truth. Yann Martel’s Life of Pi follows a young man who survives a shipwreck in a lifeboat with a large Bengal tiger – resisting hunger, thirst, fear and loneliness for 227 days. Growing up in India as a son of a zookeeper, “Pi” Patel studies […]
“Five Notes After a Visit” follows an unnamed, female narrator travelling from England to Northern Ireland (Belfast/Derry) – where she was born – to visit her boyfriend Stewart. During her visit, she experiences troubles, tensions and a trauma that she reflects upon in diary-like notes. The recommended edition Ireland – Changes and Challenges: Short Stories […]
A collection of Australia’s ancient aboriginal legends, myth and tales. This book offers ten authentic stories about how the rainbow serpent created and populated the world with plants and creatures, why frogs croak, why the kangaroo has a pouch, and how the crocodile got its scales. The beautiful illustrations that support the stories are drawn […]