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  • The Kite Runner

    Amir grows up in an affluent Kabul neighbourhood in the 1970s, the son of a charismatic businessman he calls Baba. His constant companion is Hassan, the son of the family's servant and a member of the persecuted Hazara minority. Hassan is fiercely loyal, and the two boys excel together at kite fighting, a beloved Afghan winter pastime.

    On the day of a great kite tournament, Amir witnesses an act of cruelty against Hassan and fails to intervene, a choice that poisons their friendship. When the Soviet invasion forces Amir and Baba to flee to Fremont, California, Amir builds a new life as a writer, but the past is unfinished. Years later a phone call from an old family friend draws him back to a Taliban-ruled Afghanistan.

    Hosseini's debut novel became a global bestseller, valued for its portrait of Afghan life before decades of war and for its emotional story of guilt and redemption. It touches on ethnic discrimination, father-son relationships and the immigrant experience. It was adapted into a film in 2007 and is widely read in book clubs and schools.

    Book details

    AuthorKhaled Hosseini
    First published2003
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreLiterary fiction
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)371
    SettingKabul, Afghanistan, and Fremont, California, 1970s to 2001

    Themes

    • Guilt and redemption
    • Friendship
    • Fathers and sons
    • Ethnic discrimination
    • Exile

    Who should read it

    Readers who want an emotional, page-turning story set against Afghanistan's recent history.

    If you liked this, try

    • A Thousand Splendid Suns
    • And the Mountains Echoed
    • The Book Thief

  • Life of Pi

    Piscine Molitor Patel, known as Pi, grows up in Pondicherry, where his father runs a zoo. A curious, spiritual boy, he becomes a practising Hindu, Christian and Muslim all at once, to the confusion of the local priests. When his family decides to emigrate to Canada with some of their animals, they sail on a Japanese cargo ship that sinks in the Pacific.

    Pi finds himself in a lifeboat with a wounded zebra, a hyena, an orangutan and a fully grown Bengal tiger called Richard Parker. Much of the novel describes his survival over months at sea: rationing supplies, fishing, catching rainwater, learning to establish dominance over the tiger, and coping with despair, hunger and moments of wonder, including a strange floating island.

    Martel frames the story as one told to a writer who hears it is a tale that will make him believe in God, which signals the novel's interest in faith, storytelling and how people choose to understand suffering. It won the Booker Prize in 2002 and was adapted by Ang Lee into an Oscar-winning film.

    Book details

    AuthorYann Martel
    First published2001
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreLiterary fiction
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)319
    SettingPondicherry, India, and a lifeboat on the Pacific Ocean, 1970s
    AwardsBooker Prize 2002

    Themes

    • Faith
    • Survival
    • Storytelling
    • Animals and humans
    • Truth

    Who should read it

    Readers who want an adventure story that doubles as a meditation on belief.

    If you liked this, try

    • The Old Man and the Sea
    • Robinson Crusoe
    • The Alchemist

  • Never Let Me Go

    Kathy H., now in her early thirties and working as a carer, recalls growing up at Hailsham, an apparently idyllic boarding school in the English countryside. The students are encouraged to make art and poetry, guarded closely by their teachers, called guardians, and told very little about the outside world or why they are there.

    Her memories centre on two friends: Ruth, bossy and eager to belong, and Tommy, a boy prone to rages who struggles with art. The three form a lasting triangle of affection and rivalry that carries on after they leave Hailsham for a run-down farm called the Cottages, and as adults they piece together the truth about their own purpose.

    Ishiguro reveals his premise gradually, through Kathy's calm, matter-of-fact narration, which makes the book's speculative element more unsettling rather than less. It is less a story about science than about how people accept the lives they are given, and about memory, love and mortality. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and adapted into a 2010 film.

    Book details

    AuthorKazuo Ishiguro
    First published2005
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreLiterary fiction
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)288
    SettingHailsham boarding school and rural England, late 20th century

    Themes

    • Mortality
    • Friendship
    • Acceptance
    • Memory
    • What makes us human

    Who should read it

    Readers who like quietly devastating literary fiction with a speculative edge.

    If you liked this, try

    • Klara and the Sun
    • The Remains of the Day
    • The Handmaid's Tale

  • 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.

    If you liked this, try

    • Never Let Me Go
    • Atonement
    • The Go-Between

  • 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.

    If you liked this, try

    • The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
    • 1Q84
    • Norwegian Wood

  • 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.

    If you liked this, try

    • Kafka on the Shore
    • South of the Border, West of the Sun
    • Normal People

  • 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.

    If you liked this, try

    • The Testaments
    • Nineteen Eighty-Four
    • Vox

  • 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.

    If you liked this, try

    • The Underground Railroad
    • Song of Solomon
    • The Color Purple

  • 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.

    If you liked this, try

    • No Longer at Ease
    • Half of a Yellow Sun
    • A Grain of Wheat

  • 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.

    If you liked this, try

    • The Alchemist
    • Jonathan Livingston Seagull
    • The Velveteen Rabbit