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Category: Books

  • The Book Thief

    In 1939, nine-year-old Liesel Meminger is taken to live with foster parents on Himmel Street in Molching, a small town near Munich. On the way, at her brother's graveside, she picks up her first stolen book, a gravedigger's handbook she cannot yet read. Her accordion-playing foster father, Hans Hubermann, teaches her letters in the basement late at night, while his sharp-tongued wife Rosa hides real tenderness.

    Liesel befriends Rudy Steiner, a lemon-haired neighbour who idolises Jesse Owens, and begins rescuing books from Nazi bonfires and the library of the mayor's wife. The Hubermanns then take a dangerous step by hiding Max Vandenburg, a young Jewish man, in their basement. Words become Liesel's way of understanding and resisting the world around her.

    The narrator is Death, weary, wry and oddly compassionate, who announces some events in advance and comments on human nature. Zusak, an Australian whose parents grew up in Germany and Austria, drew on their stories. Published for adults in Australia and as young adult fiction elsewhere, the book became an international bestseller and a 2013 film.

    Book details

    AuthorMarkus Zusak
    First published2005
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreHistorical fiction
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)552
    SettingMolching, a fictional town near Munich, Germany, 1939-1943
    AwardsMichael L. Printz Honor 2007

    Themes

    • The power of words
    • Death
    • Courage
    • Friendship
    • Life under Nazism

    Who should read it

    Teenagers and adults who want a moving Second World War story about books, family and kindness.

  • The Road

    Some years after an unexplained disaster has destroyed most life on Earth, a man and his young son push a shopping cart along a highway toward the coast, hoping the south will be warmer. The sky is grey with ash, plants and animals are gone, and the few survivors scavenge for canned food or have turned to brutal violence, including cannibalism.

    Neither character is named. The man is ill and determined to protect the boy at any cost, while the boy, born after the catastrophe, clings to the idea that they are the good guys who carry the fire. Their days are a cycle of searching abandoned houses, hiding from roving gangs and talking in brief, tender exchanges as the father teaches survival and tries to preserve his son's humanity.

    McCarthy writes in fragmented, sparse prose with almost no punctuation for dialogue, creating a bleak, hypnotic rhythm. Beneath the horror is one of the most moving portraits of parental love in modern fiction. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize in 2007, was adapted into a film, and is a landmark of post-apocalyptic literature.

    Book details

    AuthorCormac McCarthy
    First published2006
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreLiterary fiction
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)287
    SettingA devastated post-apocalyptic United States, heading toward the southern coast
    AwardsPulitzer Prize for Fiction 2007

    Themes

    • Fatherhood
    • Survival
    • Hope
    • Morality amid collapse
    • Love

    Who should read it

    Readers who can handle darkness and want a spare, powerful story about a parent's love.

  • The Name of the Rose

    In the winter of 1327, William of Baskerville, an English Franciscan with a sharp, empirical mind, arrives at a Benedictine abbey in the mountains of northern Italy, accompanied by Adso of Melk, a young Benedictine novice who narrates the story many years later. William has come to help prepare a tense theological debate between papal envoys and Franciscan representatives over the poverty of Christ.

    Soon after their arrival a young monk is found dead, and more deaths follow over seven days. The abbot asks William to investigate, and his inquiries lead toward the abbey's vast library, a forbidden maze of rooms guarded jealously by the monks, and toward a mysterious book that someone is willing to kill to protect. The Inquisition's arrival raises the stakes further.

    Eco, a semiotics professor, packs the novel with medieval philosophy, heresy, Latin quotations and debates about laughter and knowledge, while keeping a detective plot that nods to Sherlock Holmes. William Weaver's translation made it an international bestseller, it won Italy's Strega Prize, and it was filmed with Sean Connery in 1986.

    Book details

    AuthorUmberto Eco
    First published1980
    Original languageItalian
    Translated byWilliam Weaver
    GenreMystery
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)536
    SettingA Benedictine abbey in northern Italy, November 1327
    AwardsStrega Prize 1981

    Themes

    • Knowledge and censorship
    • Faith versus reason
    • Heresy
    • Power of the Church
    • Interpretation of signs

    Who should read it

    Readers who enjoy intellectual mysteries steeped in history, philosophy and medieval detail.

  • The Little Prince

    A pilot crash-lands in the Sahara with only a few days of drinking water and is surprised by a small, golden-haired boy who asks him to draw a sheep. The boy, it emerges, has come from a tiny asteroid where he tended three volcanoes and a single proud, demanding rose, whose vanity eventually drove him to leave home.

    In episodes he recounts to the pilot, the prince visits other small planets, each inhabited by a lone adult absorbed in something absurd: a king with no subjects, a businessman counting stars he believes he owns, a lamplighter following pointless orders, a geographer who never explores. On Earth he meets a snake and a fox, and the fox teaches him what it means to tame someone and be responsible for them.

    Saint-Exupery, himself an aviator, illustrated the book with his own watercolours and wrote it in exile in the United States during the Second World War. It reads as a children's story but speaks most directly to adults about the narrowness of grown-up priorities. It is among the most translated books ever written, and Katherine Woods's early English version remains widely known.

    Book details

    AuthorAntoine de Saint-Exupery
    First published1943
    Original languageFrench
    Translated byKatherine Woods
    GenreChildren's
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)96
    SettingThe Sahara desert and the prince's asteroid, B-612

    Themes

    • Friendship
    • Love and responsibility
    • Childhood perspective
    • Loss
    • What matters most

    Who should read it

    Children and adults alike, especially anyone who suspects grown-ups have forgotten something important.

  • Things Fall Apart

    Okonkwo is a respected man in Umuofia, a cluster of Igbo villages in what is now southeastern Nigeria. He won fame as a young wrestler and has built wealth through yams, wives and titles, driven above all by fear of resembling his gentle, indebted father. He rules his household harshly and treats any sign of softness in himself as weakness.

    The first part of the novel lays out village life in rich detail: harvest festivals, marriage negotiations, consultations with oracles, the role of the egwugwu masked spirits, and proverbs that season every conversation. A grave mistake forces Okonkwo into years of exile in his mother's village, and while he is away, Christian missionaries and then colonial administrators arrive and begin to reshape Umuofia.

    Achebe wrote partly in response to European novels that depicted Africans as backdrop or savages, and he presents Igbo society from the inside, complex, democratic and flawed. His plain English, shaped by Igbo idiom, became a model for later African writers. The book is one of the most widely read African novels and a cornerstone of postcolonial literature worldwide.

    Book details

    AuthorChinua Achebe
    First published1958
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreClassic
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)209
    SettingUmuofia, Igbo villages in southeastern Nigeria, late 19th century

    Themes

    • Colonialism
    • Masculinity
    • Tradition versus change
    • Religion
    • Pride

    Who should read it

    Anyone wanting to understand pre-colonial African society and the shock of colonial contact, told from the African side.

  • Beloved

    Sethe escaped slavery on a Kentucky farm called Sweet Home and now lives at 124 Bluestone Road outside Cincinnati with her teenage daughter Denver. The house is haunted by a furious, grieving presence that has driven away her two sons. When Paul D, another survivor of Sweet Home, turns up after years of wandering, he forces the spirit out and tries to build a life with Sethe.

    Soon afterwards a young woman who calls herself Beloved appears, soaking wet and seemingly from nowhere, and attaches herself to Sethe with an almost ravenous need. Her presence draws long-buried memories to the surface for each member of the household, and the novel slowly pieces together what happened at Sweet Home and in the days after Sethe's escape.

    Morrison drew on the true story of Margaret Garner, who fled slavery in 1856, to write about memory that refuses to stay buried. The narrative is fragmented and poetic, circling events rather than stating them. Beloved won the Pulitzer Prize and is often named among the greatest American novels; it confronts the psychological legacy of slavery with unflinching intensity.

    Book details

    AuthorToni Morrison
    First published1987
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreLiterary fiction
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)324
    SettingOutside Cincinnati, Ohio, 1873, with memories of a Kentucky plantation
    AwardsPulitzer Prize for Fiction 1988

    Themes

    • Slavery and its aftermath
    • Motherhood
    • Memory and trauma
    • Haunting
    • Freedom

    Who should read it

    Readers prepared for a demanding, haunting novel about the inner scars slavery left behind.

  • The Handmaid’s Tale

    After a coup topples the United States government, a fundamentalist regime called Gilead takes power in New England. With birth rates collapsing, the few women still able to conceive are assigned as Handmaids to high-ranking Commanders and their wives, stripped of their names, property and right to read. The narrator, known only as Offred, is one of them.

    Offred recounts her daily routine of shopping trips, rituals and surveillance in the household of a Commander and his wife Serena Joy, interleaved with memories of her former life with a husband and daughter. Small risks, from forbidden games of Scrabble to whispered contact with other women, hint at resistance, and a chauffeur named Nick complicates her sense of who can be trusted.

    Atwood said she included nothing that had not already happened somewhere in history, which gives the book its chill. Its restrained, intimate first-person voice makes the horror feel personal rather than abstract. Winner of the Governor General's Award and the first Arthur C. Clarke Award, it gained a vast new audience through the television series, and red handmaid robes became a protest symbol.

    Book details

    AuthorMargaret Atwood
    First published1985
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreScience fiction
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)311
    SettingGilead, a theocracy in the former United States, around Cambridge, Massachusetts
    AwardsGovernor General's Award for English-language fiction 1985, Arthur C. Clarke Award 1987

    Themes

    • Reproductive control
    • Religious authoritarianism
    • Gender oppression
    • Resistance
    • Memory

    Who should read it

    Readers who want a gripping dystopia about women's rights, power and complicity.

  • Norwegian Wood

    Hearing a Beatles song on a plane in his late thirties, Toru Watanabe is carried back to his student years in Tokyo at the end of the 1960s. His closest friend Kizuki killed himself at seventeen, and Toru later drifts into an intense, tender relationship with Kizuki's former girlfriend Naoko, who is deeply troubled by the loss.

    When Naoko withdraws to a sanatorium in the mountains near Kyoto, Toru visits her there and meets her roommate Reiko, an older music teacher with her own history. Back in Tokyo he befriends Midori, an outspoken, funny classmate whose family is dealing with illness. Against a backdrop of student protests he barely engages with, Toru must decide where his loyalty and love lie.

    Unlike most of Murakami's work, the book has no talking cats or parallel worlds; it is a straightforward story of grief, sexuality and growing up. Its success in Japan was enormous and turned Murakami into a celebrity. Jay Rubin's translation is the standard English version, and readers often return to it for its melancholy atmosphere.

    Book details

    AuthorHaruki Murakami
    First published1987
    Original languageJapanese
    Translated byJay Rubin
    GenreLiterary fiction
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)296
    SettingTokyo and a sanatorium near Kyoto, late 1960s

    Themes

    • Grief
    • First love
    • Mental illness
    • Nostalgia
    • Coming of age

    Who should read it

    Readers who want Murakami without the surrealism, or anyone drawn to quiet novels about love and loss.

  • Kafka on the Shore

    On his fifteenth birthday, a boy who calls himself Kafka Tamura runs away from his father's home in Tokyo, haunted by a dark prophecy and the absence of his mother and sister, who left when he was small. He ends up in Takamatsu on the island of Shikoku, where he finds refuge in a quiet private library run by the elegant, reserved Miss Saeki and a sharp librarian named Oshima.

    In alternating chapters, Satoru Nakata, an elderly man left unable to read after a strange incident during the Second World War, earns pocket money by finding lost cats, with whom he can converse. A violent encounter sends him on the road too, accompanied by a good-natured truck driver named Hoshino. Fish fall from the sky, Colonel Sanders appears, and the two journeys draw toward each other.

    Murakami borrows the shape of Greek tragedy, especially the Oedipus myth, and blends it with Japanese folklore, pop culture and classical music. The novel resists tidy explanation and invites readers to live with mysteries. Philip Gabriel's translation won it a wide English readership, and it received the World Fantasy Award in 2006.

    Book details

    AuthorHaruki Murakami
    First published2002
    Original languageJapanese
    Translated byPhilip Gabriel
    GenreLiterary fiction
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)467
    SettingTokyo and Takamatsu, Shikoku, Japan
    AwardsWorld Fantasy Award for Best Novel 2006

    Themes

    • Fate
    • Identity
    • Memory
    • The unconscious
    • Loss of a parent

    Who should read it

    Readers who enjoy dreamlike, puzzling fiction that mixes myth, metaphysics and everyday detail.

  • The Remains of the Day

    Stevens has served as butler at Darlington Hall for more than thirty years. The house now belongs to a genial American, Mr Farraday, who lends him a car for a few days off. Stevens sets out for the West Country, ostensibly to persuade the former housekeeper, Miss Kenton, to return to work, and along the way he reminisces about his years under Lord Darlington.

    His memories centre on the interwar period, when Darlington hosted unofficial conferences of diplomats and politicians and drifted into sympathy with appeasement of Nazi Germany. Stevens recalls these events through the lens of professional duty and his ideal of dignity, and in doing so he skirts his relationship with Miss Kenton, whose warmth he repeatedly deflected.

    Ishiguro's achievement is the narrating voice: formal, self-justifying and quietly evasive, so the reader learns what Stevens cannot admit. The novel examines loyalty, emotional repression and the cost of devoting a life to someone else's judgment. It won the Booker Prize in 1989 and became an acclaimed film with Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson.

    Book details

    AuthorKazuo Ishiguro
    First published1989
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreLiterary fiction
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)245
    SettingDarlington Hall and the English West Country, July 1956, with memories of the 1920s-30s
    AwardsBooker Prize 1989

    Themes

    • Duty
    • Emotional repression
    • Regret
    • Dignity
    • Self-deception

    Who should read it

    Readers who appreciate subtle, restrained novels where what is left unsaid matters most.