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Category: Books

  • Frankenstein

    Mary Shelley began the story at eighteen during the wet summer of 1816 at Lake Geneva, when Lord Byron challenged his guests to write ghost stories. Published anonymously in 1818 and revised in 1831, the novel is framed by the letters of Robert Walton, an Arctic explorer who rescues an exhausted traveller from the ice.

    The traveller is Victor Frankenstein, a gifted young man from Geneva who, as a student at Ingolstadt, becomes obsessed with discovering the secret of life. He assembles a body and succeeds in animating it, but recoils in horror from the being he has made and flees. The creature, left alone, educates himself by secretly watching a cottage family and reading Milton, Plutarch and Goethe, and in the novel's central section tells his own eloquent story of rejection.

    Far from the grunting monster of film, Shelley's creature is articulate and sympathetic, and the book asks who the real monster is. It explores scientific ambition, responsibility for what we create, isolation and the need for companionship, themes that still frame debates about technology.

    Book details

    AuthorMary Shelley
    First published1818
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreScience fiction
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)280
    SettingGeneva, Ingolstadt, the Alps and the Arctic, 18th century

    Themes

    • Scientific ambition
    • Creation and responsibility
    • Isolation
    • Revenge
    • Nature of humanity

    Who should read it

    Readers curious about the origins of science fiction and horror, and anyone interested in the ethics of creation.

  • Dracula

    Jonathan Harker, a young English solicitor, travels to the Carpathian Mountains to help Count Dracula complete the purchase of an estate near London. His host is courteous but strange, and Harker gradually realises he is a prisoner in a castle where the Count crawls down walls and three spectral women haunt the rooms.

    The story then moves to England, where Harker's fiancee Mina and her friend Lucy Westenra become entangled in a series of disturbing events after a ship runs aground at Whitby with its crew dead. Lucy's suitors, the asylum doctor John Seward, the American Quincey Morris and Arthur Holmwood, call in the Dutch professor Abraham Van Helsing, whose knowledge of folklore and science may be their only defence.

    Told through diaries, letters, newspaper cuttings and phonograph records, the novel creates suspense from fragments that the characters must piece together. It drew on Eastern European vampire legend and Victorian anxieties about sexuality, disease, immigration and modern technology, and its count became the template for the vampire in popular culture.

    Book details

    AuthorBram Stoker
    First published1897
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreHorror
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)418
    SettingTransylvania, Whitby and London, 1890s

    Themes

    • Good and evil
    • Sexuality
    • Fear of the foreign
    • Science versus superstition
    • Modernity

    Who should read it

    Horror fans who want the original vampire novel and readers who enjoy stories pieced together from documents.

  • The Picture of Dorian Gray

    In a London studio the painter Basil Hallward completes a portrait of Dorian Gray, a young man of extraordinary beauty whom he idolises. Basil's friend Lord Henry Wotton, a languid aristocrat with a talent for scandalous epigrams, tells Dorian that youth is the only thing worth having. Seized by the thought of growing old, Dorian wishes the picture could age instead of him.

    The wish seems to come true. As Dorian follows Lord Henry's philosophy of pleasure and new sensations, his face remains unlined while the canvas, locked away in an old schoolroom, begins to change with every cruel act. His romance with a young actress, Sibyl Vane, is the first sign of what he is becoming, and rumours of his corrupting influence spread through London society.

    First published in Lippincott's Monthly Magazine in 1890 and expanded as a book the following year, the novel was attacked as immoral and later used against Wilde at his trials. It combines Gothic fable with sparkling dialogue and explores aestheticism, vanity, hidden lives and the relationship between art and morality.

    Book details

    AuthorOscar Wilde
    First published1890
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreClassic
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)254
    SettingLondon, late 19th century

    Themes

    • Vanity
    • Aestheticism
    • Corruption
    • Double life
    • Art and morality

    Who should read it

    Readers who enjoy witty dialogue and Gothic morality tales about beauty, influence and secret sin.

  • Educated

    Tara Westover was the youngest of seven children raised on a mountain in Idaho by parents who distrusted the government, public schools and hospitals. Her father, convinced the world was about to end, stockpiled supplies and put his children to work in his scrapyard, where serious injuries were treated with her mother's herbal remedies rather than at a hospital. Tara had no birth certificate until she was nine.

    At seventeen, having never attended a classroom, she taught herself enough mathematics and grammar to pass the ACT and enrol at Brigham Young University. There she heard of the Holocaust for the first time and began to see her upbringing from the outside. Scholarships took her to Cambridge and Harvard, and she earned a doctorate in history.

    The heart of the memoir is less about academic success than about the cost of change. Westover writes about a violent older brother, the pull of family loyalty, and the struggle to trust her own memory when relatives remember events differently. Her clear, unsentimental prose made the book a long-running bestseller.

    Book details

    AuthorTara Westover
    First published2018
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreMemoir
    TypeNon-fiction
    Pages (approx.)334
    SettingRural Idaho, Utah and Cambridge, England

    Themes

    • Education
    • Family loyalty
    • Abuse
    • Self-invention
    • Memory

    Who should read it

    Readers moved by stories of self-transformation and anyone wrestling with the pull between family and personal growth.

  • When Breath Becomes Air

    Paul Kalanithi had studied English literature and biology at Stanford, history and philosophy of science at Cambridge, and medicine at Yale before training as a neurosurgeon at Stanford. In his final year of residency, with prestigious job offers waiting, he was diagnosed with metastatic lung cancer despite never having smoked.

    The first part of the book describes how a young man obsessed with the question of what gives life meaning chose to pursue it through the brain, the organ where identity resides. He conveys the punishing hours of surgical training and the weight of operating on patients whose speech or personality could be changed by a millimetre. The second part shifts to his illness: treatment, the uncertainty of prognosis, his return to the operating room, and the decision with his wife Lucy to have a child.

    Kalanithi died in March 2015 before finishing the manuscript; Lucy Kalanithi wrote an epilogue, and Abraham Verghese contributed a foreword. Spare and lyrical, it is often read by medical students and by families facing serious illness. The book asks how a person should spend limited time and what work, love and meaning look like when the future suddenly shrinks.

    Book details

    AuthorPaul Kalanithi
    First published2016
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreMemoir
    TypeNon-fiction
    Pages (approx.)228
    SettingStanford, California

    Themes

    • Mortality
    • Medicine
    • Meaning
    • Illness
    • Fatherhood

    Who should read it

    Anyone facing serious illness, caring for someone who is, or interested in the ethics and inner life of medicine.

  • Born a Crime

    Trevor Noah was born in Johannesburg in 1984 to a Black Xhosa mother and a white Swiss father at a time when their relationship was illegal under apartheid's Immorality Act. His very existence was evidence of a crime, so as a small child he was often kept indoors and could not be seen in public with his father.

    The memoir is organised as a series of linked essays rather than a strict chronology. Noah recounts life in Soweto with his grandmother, being too light-skinned for Black neighbourhoods and too dark for white ones, using language to slip between groups, running a pirated CD business as a teenager in Alexandra township, and brushes with the police. Each chapter is introduced by a short explanation of the history or politics behind it.

    At the centre stands his mother, Patricia, a devout, independent woman who refused to let the system define her son. The book is laugh-out-loud funny yet unflinching about poverty, racism and domestic violence. It won the 2017 Thurber Prize for American Humor and has a young readers' edition.

    Book details

    AuthorTrevor Noah
    First published2016
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreMemoir
    TypeNon-fiction
    Pages (approx.)304
    SettingJohannesburg and Soweto, South Africa, 1980s-2000s
    AwardsThurber Prize for American Humor 2017

    Themes

    • Apartheid
    • Race and identity
    • Mothers and sons
    • Poverty
    • Language

    Who should read it

    Readers who want to understand apartheid's legacy through a personal story that is as funny as it is moving.

  • Shoe Dog

    In 1962, fresh from Stanford business school, Phil Knight persuaded his father to lend him money for a trip around the world and pitched himself, with no company behind him, to the Japanese shoemaker Onitsuka Tiger. He came home as the American distributor of their running shoes and started selling them from the back of his car at track meets in Oregon.

    The memoir covers the years from that crazy idea to Nike's public offering in 1980. Knight describes his partnership with Bill Bowerman, his old University of Oregon track coach, who tinkered with soles on a waffle iron, and the eccentric early employees who ran the business. Much of the drama is financial: constant cash crises, hostile banks, a bitter split with Onitsuka and the creation of the Nike brand and swoosh, plus a ruinous customs duty dispute.

    Knight writes with unusual candour about self-doubt, mistakes and the toll on his family. Little of it reads like a corporate history; it is a story about persistence and the chaotic reality of starting a company. The final chapters step back to reflect on what the company cost him and on the people who made it possible, giving the memoir an unexpectedly moving close.

    Book details

    AuthorPhil Knight
    First published2016
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreMemoir
    TypeNon-fiction
    Pages (approx.)386
    SettingOregon and Japan, 1962-1980

    Themes

    • Entrepreneurship
    • Persistence
    • Partnership
    • Risk
    • Sport

    Who should read it

    Aspiring founders and sports fans who want an honest account of how messy and uncertain building a business really is.

  • Pride and Prejudice

    Mr and Mrs Bennet of Longbourn have five daughters and no son, which means their estate will pass to a distant cousin and the girls must marry well. When a wealthy young bachelor, Mr Bingley, rents a nearby house, Mrs Bennet sets her sights on him for her eldest daughter, the gentle Jane. Bingley's friend Mr Darcy, richer still, makes a poor first impression at a local ball by snubbing the second daughter, Elizabeth.

    Elizabeth is clever, lively and quick to judge, and her dislike of Darcy hardens when the charming officer George Wickham tells her a story about Darcy's past. Around them circle a memorable cast: the pompous clergyman Mr Collins, the imperious Lady Catherine de Bourgh, the flighty youngest sister Lydia and the sardonic Mr Bennet.

    Austen's irony, sharp dialogue and free indirect narration make the novel feel modern more than two centuries after publication. Beneath the romance it examines class, marriage as economic necessity and the danger of trusting first impressions. It has inspired countless adaptations and retellings.

    Book details

    AuthorJane Austen
    First published1813
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreClassic
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)432
    SettingHertfordshire and Derbyshire, England, early 1800s

    Themes

    • Marriage and class
    • First impressions
    • Pride
    • Family
    • Women's independence

    Who should read it

    Anyone who enjoys witty dialogue and romance, and readers looking for an accessible way into classic literature.

  • Emma

    Emma Woodhouse is twenty-one, mistress of her widowed father's house at Hartfield and the leading young lady of the village of Highbury. Having taken credit for her governess's happy marriage, she decides she has a talent for matchmaking and takes up Harriet Smith, a sweet young woman of unknown parentage, determined to find her a husband above her station.

    Emma's schemes misfire again and again because she misreads the people around her, including the ambitious vicar Mr Elton, the charming Frank Churchill and the reserved, accomplished Jane Fairfax. Her neighbour and old family friend Mr Knightley is the only one who regularly tells her when she is wrong. The supporting cast includes the endlessly talkative Miss Bates and the hypochondriac Mr Woodhouse.

    Austen said she was creating a heroine whom no one but herself would much like, yet Emma's flaws and growing self-knowledge make the novel one of her richest. Its intricate plotting and irony influenced the modern novel, and it inspired adaptations including the film Clueless.

    Book details

    AuthorJane Austen
    First published1815
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreClassic
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)474
    SettingHighbury, Surrey, England, early 1800s

    Themes

    • Self-deception
    • Class
    • Matchmaking
    • Maturity
    • Village society

    Who should read it

    Readers who love Pride and Prejudice and want Austen's subtlest comedy of misjudgement and growing up.

  • Jane Eyre

    Jane Eyre is an orphan raised resentfully by her aunt at Gateshead Hall, where she is bullied by her cousins and locked in a room she believes is haunted. Sent away to Lowood, a harsh charity school run by a hypocritical clergyman, she endures cold, hunger and disease but gains an education and a lasting friendship that shapes her moral outlook.

    As a young woman she takes a post as governess at Thornfield Hall, teaching the French ward of Edward Rochester, a moody, sardonic gentleman. A strong bond grows between them, but the house holds mysteries: strange laughter in the upper corridors, a fire in the night and a secret that tests Jane's principles. Later sections take her across the moors and into the household of the austere clergyman St John Rivers.

    Told in Jane's own intimate, passionate first-person voice, the novel was startling in 1847 for its plain heroine who insists on equality of spirit with the man she loves. It blends Gothic atmosphere with a coming-of-age story and remains central to discussions of women's independence in fiction.

    Book details

    AuthorCharlotte Bronte
    First published1847
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreClassic
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)500
    SettingNorthern England, early 19th century

    Themes

    • Independence
    • Moral integrity
    • Class
    • Love
    • Religion

    Who should read it

    Readers who want a Gothic-tinged love story with a heroine who refuses to compromise her self-respect.