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A selection of Indie
recommendations for August
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 Super Sad True Love
Story,Gary Shteyngart The author of two critically acclaimed novels, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook and Absurdistan, Gary Shteyngart has risen to the top of the fiction world. Now, in his hilarious and heartfelt new novel, he envisions a deliciously dark tale of America’s dysfunctional coming years—and the timeless and tender feelings that just might bring us back from the brink. In a very near future—oh, let’s say next Tuesday—a functionally illiterate America is about to collapse. But don’t that tell that to poor Lenny Abramov, the thirty-nine-year-old son of an angry Russian immigrant janitor, proud author of what may well be the world’s last diary, and less-proud owner of a bald spot shaped like the great state of Ohio. Despite his job at an outfit called Post-Human Services, which attempts to provide immortality for its super-rich clientele, death is clearly stalking this cholesterol-rich morsel of a man. And why shouldn’t it? Lenny’s from a different century—he totally loves books (or “printed, bound media artifacts,” as they’re now known), even though most of his peers find them smelly and annoying. But even more than books, Lenny loves Eunice Park, an impossibly cute and impossibly cruel twenty-four-year-old Korean American woman who just graduated from Elderbird College with a major in Images and a minor in Assertiveness. After meeting Lenny on an extended Roman holiday, blistering Eunice puts that Assertiveness minor to work, teaching our “ancient dork” effective new ways to brush his teeth and making him buy a cottony nonflammable wardrobe. But America proves less flame-resistant than Lenny’s new threads. The country is crushed by a credit crisis, riots break out in New York’s Central Park, the city’s streets are lined with National Guard tanks on every corner, the dollar is so over, and our patient Chinese creditors may just be ready to foreclose on the whole mess. Undeterred, Lenny vows to love both Eunice and his homeland. He’s going to convince his fickle new love that in a time without standards or stability, in a world where single people can determine a dating prospect’s “hotness” and “sustainability” with the click of a button, in a society where the privileged may live forever but the unfortunate will die all too soon, there is still value in being a real human being. Wildly funny, rich, and humane, Super Sad True Love Story is a knockout novel by a young master, a book in which falling in love just may redeem a planet falling apart.   The Great Typo Hunt,Jeff Deck & Benjamin D. Herson The signs of the times are missing apostrophes. The world needed a hero, but how would an editor with no off-switch answer the call? For Jeff Deck, the writing was literally on the wall: “NO TRESSPASSING.” In that moment, his greater purpose became clear. Dark hordes of typos had descended upon civilization… and only he could wield the marker to defeat them. Recruiting his friend Benjamin and other valiant companions, he created the Typo Eradication Advancement League (TEAL). Armed with markers, chalk, and correction fluid, they circumnavigated America, righting the glaring errors displayed in grocery stores, museums, malls, restaurants, mini-golf courses, beaches, and even a national park. Jeff and Benjamin championed the cause of clear communication, blogging about their adventures transforming horor into horror, it’s into its, and coconunut into coconut. But at the Grand Canyon, they took one correction too far: fixing the bad grammar in a fake Native American watchtower. The government charged them with defacing federal property and summoned them to court—with a typo-ridden complaint that claimed that they had violated “criminal statues.” Now the press turned these paragons of punctuation into “grammar vigilantes,” airing errors about their errant errand.. The radiant dream of TEAL would not fade, though. Beneath all those misspelled words and mislaid apostrophes, Jeff and Benjamin unearthed deeper dilemmas about education, race, history, and how we communicate. Ultimately their typo-hunting journey tells a larger story not just of proper punctuation but of the power of language and literacy—and the importance of always taking a second look. |
 The
Tower, The Zoo & The Tortoise,Julia Stuart Balthazar Jones has lived in the Tower of London with his loving wife, Hebe, and his 120-year-old pet tortoise for the past eight years. That’s right, he is a Beefeater (they really do live there). It’s no easy job living and working in the tourist attraction in present-day London. Among the eccentric characters who call the Tower’s maze of ancient buildings and spiral staircases home are the Tower’s Rack & Ruin barmaid, Ruby Dore, who just found out she’s pregnant; portly Valerie Jennings, who is falling for ticket inspector Arthur Catnip; the lifelong bachelor Reverend Septimus Drew, who secretly pens a series of principled erotica; and the philandering Ravenmaster, aiming to avenge the death of one of his insufferable ravens. When Balthazar is tasked with setting up an elaborate menagerie within the Tower walls to house the many exotic animals gifted to the Queen, life at the Tower gets all the more interesting. Penguins escape, giraffes are stolen, and the Komodo dragon sends innocent people running for their lives. Balthazar is in charge and things are not exactly running smoothly. Then Hebe decides to leave him and his beloved tortoise “runs” away.   Composed,Rosanne Cash For thirty years as a musician, Rosanne Cash has enjoyed both critical and commercial success, releasing a series of albums that are as notable for their lyrical intelligence as for their musical excellence. Now, in her memoir, Cash writes compellingly about her upbringing in Southern California as the child of country legend Johnny Cash, and of her relationships with her mother and her famous stepmother, June Carter Cash. In her account of her development as an artist she shares memories of a hilarious stint as a twenty-year-old working for Columbia Records in London, recording her own first album on a German label, working her way to success, her marriage to Rodney Crowell, a union that made them Nashville's premier couple, her relationship with the country music establishment, taking a new direction in her music and leaving Nashville to move to New York. As well as motherhood, dealing with the deaths of her parents, in part through music, the process of songwriting, and the fulfillment she has found with her current husband and musical collaborator, John Leventhal. Cash has written an unconventional and compelling memoir that, in the tradition of M. F. K. Fisher's The Gastronomical Me and Frank Conroy's Stop-Time, is a series of linked pieces that combine to form a luminous and brilliant whole.  Per Petterson It is 1989 and all over Europe Communism is crumbling. Arvid Jansen, 37, is in the throes of a divorce. At the same time, his mother is diagnosed with cancer. Over a few intense autumn days, we follow Arvid as he struggles to find a new footing in his life, while all the established patterns around him are changing at staggering speed. As he attempts to negotiate the present, he casts his mind back to holidays on the beach with his brothers, to courtship, and to his early working life, when as a young Communist he abandoned his studies to work on a production line. I Curse the River of Time is an honest, heartbreaking yet humorous portrayal of a complicated mother-son relationship told in Petterson’s precise and beautiful prose. |
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Books for the end of the world         |
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A Selection of Short Stories     |
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| The Notable Books Council of the Reference and User Services Association (RUSA), a division of the American Library Association (ALA), compiled its 2010 list of outstanding books for the general reader. The titles were selected for their significant contribution to the expansion of knowledge and for the pleasure they can provide. | |||||||||
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Let The Great World
Spin, Colum McCann "Phillipe Petit’s highwire walk between the Twin Towers provides the backdrop for this rich portrait of the unlikely connections among a group of New Yorkers in the 1970s." New York, August 1974. A man is walking the sky. The city stands still in awe. Between the newly built Twin Towers the man is striding, twirling and showboating his way through the air. One hundred and ten stories below him, the lives of eight strangers spin towards each other... Corrigan, a radical, passionate Irish monk working in the Bronx with a clutch of prostitutes; Claire, a delicate Upper East Side housewife reeling from the death of her son in Vietnam; her husband Solomon, a cynical judge turning over petty criminals in a downtown court; Lara, a young artist struggling with a spiralling drug addiction and a doomed marriage; Fernando, a thirteen-year-old photographer chasing underground graffiti; Gloria, solid and proud despite decades of hardship; Tillie, a courageous hooker who used to dream of a better life; and Jazzlyn, her beautiful, reckless daughter raised on promises that reach beyond the high-rises of New York. Set against a time of sweeping political and social change, from the backlash against the Vietnam War and the lingering spectre of the oil crisis to the beginnings of the Internet – a time that hauntingly mirrors the present time – these disparate lives will collide in the shadow of one reckless and beautiful act, and be transformed for ever. Weaving together themes of love, loss, belonging, duty and human striving, Let the Great World Spin celebrates the effervescent spirit of an age and the small beauties of everyday life. At once intimate and magnificent, elegant and astonishing, it is a lyrical masterpiece from a storyteller who continues to use the wide world as his canvas.  The Year Of The
Flood,Margaret Atwood "In the near future, two women survive an apocalyptic event in a queasily enthralling work." Adam One, the kindly leader of the God’s Gardeners – a religion devoted to the melding of science and religion, the preservation of all species, the tending of the Earth, and the cultivation of bees and organic crops on flat rooftops – has long predicted the Waterless Flood. Now it has occurred, obliterating most human life. Two women have avoided it: the young trapeze-dancer, Ren, locked into the high-end sex club, Scales and Tails; and former SecretBurgers meat-slinger turned Gardener, Toby, barricaded into the luxurious AnooYoo Spa, where many of the treatments are edible. Have others survived? Ren’s bioartist friend Amanda, or the MaddAddam eco-fighters? Ren’s one-time teenage lover, Jimmy? Or the murderous Painballers, survivors of the mutual-elimination Painball prison? Not to mention the CorpSeCorps, the shadowy and corrupt policing force of the ruling powers… Meanwhile, in the natural world, gene-spliced life forms are proliferating: the lion/lamb blends, the Mo’hair sheep with human hair, the pigs with human brain tissue. As Adam One and his intrepid hemp-clad band make their way through a ruined world, singing their devotional hymns and faithful to their creed and to their Saints – Saint Francis Assisi, Saint Rachel Carson, and Saint Al Gore among them – what odds for Ren and Toby, and for the human race? By turns dark, tender, violent, thoughtful and uneasily hilarious, The Year of the Flood is Atwood at her most effective.  Await Your Reply,Dan Chaon "This chilling exploration of the modern meaning of identity follows three people on the fringes of society." Longing to get on with his life, Miles Cheshire nevertheless can’t stop searching for his troubled twin brother, Hayden, who has been missing for ten years. Hayden has covered his tracks skillfully, moving stealthily from place to place, managing along the way to hold down various jobs and seem, to the people he meets, entirely normal. But some version of the truth is always concealed. A few days after graduating from high school, Lucy Lattimore sneaks away from the small town of Pompey, Ohio, with her charismatic former history teacher. They arrive in Nebraska, in the middle of nowhere, at a long-deserted motel next to a dried-up reservoir, to figure out the next move on their path to a new life. But soon Lucy begins to feel quietly uneasy. My whole life is a lie, thinks Ryan Schuyler, who has recently learned some shocking news. In response, he walks off the Northwestern University campus, hops on a bus, and breaks loose from his existence, which suddenly seems abstract and tenuous. Presumed dead, Ryan decides to remake himself–through unconventional and precarious means.  Spooner,Pete Dexter "A boy struggles to navigate the vagaries of the world with the lifelong guidance of his stepfather in this funny and heartbreaking tale." Warren Spooner was born after a prolonged delivery in a makeshift delivery room in a doctor's office in Milledgeville, Georgia, on the first Saturday of December, 1956. His father died shortly afterward, long before Spooner had even a memory of his face, and was replaced eventually by a once-brilliant young naval officer, Calmer Ottosson, recently court-martialed out of service. This is the story of the lifelong tie between the two men, poles apart, of Spooner's troubled childhood, troubled adolescence, violent and troubled adulthood and Calmer Ottosson's inexhaustible patience, undertaking a life-long struggle to salvage his step-son, a man he will never understand. Tinkers,Paul Harding "In this lyrical novel, the life of a dying man is examined through the smallest moments of time and memory." An old man lies dying. Confined to bed in his living room, he sees the walls around him begin to collapse, the windows come loose from their sashes, and the ceiling plaster fall off in great chunks, showering him with a lifetime of debris: newspaper clippings, old photographs, wool jackets, rusty tools, and the mangled brass works of antique clocks. Soon, the clouds from the sky above plummet down on top of him, followed by the stars, till the black night covers him like a shroud. He is hallucinating, in death throes from cancer and kidney failure. A methodical repairer of clocks, he is now finally released from the usual constraints of time and memory to rejoin his father, an epileptic, itinerant peddler, whom he had lost 7 decades before. In his return to the wonder and pain of his impoverished childhood in the backwoods of Maine, he recovers a natural world that is at once indifferent to man and inseparable from him, menacing and awe inspiring. Tinkers is about the legacy of consciousness and the porousness of identity from one generation the next. At once heartbreaking and life affirming, it is an elegiac meditation on love, loss, and the fierce beauty of nature.  Born To Run,Christopher McDougall At the heart of Born to Run lies a mysterious tribe of Mexican Indians, the Tarahumara, who live quietly in canyons and are reputed to be the best distance runners in the world; in 1993, one of them, aged 57, came first in a prestigious 100-mile race wearing a toga and sandals. A small group of the world’s top ultra-runners (and the awe-inspiring author) make the treacherous journey into the canyons to try to learn the tribe’s secrets and then take them on over a course 50 miles long. With incredible energy and smart observation, McDougall tells this story while asking what the secrets are to being an incredible runner. Travelling to labs at Harvard, Nike, and elsewhere, he comes across an incredible cast of characters, including the woman who recently broke the world record for 100 miles and for her encore ran a 2:50 marathon in a bikini, pausing to down a beer at the 20 mile mark. "The best book I've ever read" ~ read Darren Rovell's review |
 The Anthologist,Nicholson Baker "A charming failure, poet Paul Chowder struggles to regain his muse and his girlfriend while watching deadlines slip by." Nicholson Baker's new novel, The Anthologist, is narrated by Paul Chowder, a poet of some little reknown who is sitting in his barn most of the time trying to write the introduction to a new anthology of poetry called Only Rhyme. He's having a hard time getting started because his career is falling apart, his girlfriend Roz has recently left him, and he is thinking about the poets throughout history who have suffered far worse and actually deserve to feel sorry for themselves. He has also promised his readers that he will reveal many wonderful secrets and tips and tricks about poetry, and it looks like the introduction will be a little longer than he'd thought. What unfolds is a wholly entertaining and beguiling love story about poetry, among other things; Paul tells us about all of the great poets, from Tennyson, Swinburne, and Yeats to the moderns (Roethke, Bogan, Merwin) to the contemporary scene as well as the editorial staff of The New Yorker's editorial department. And what he reveals about the rhythm and music of poetry itself is astonishing and makes you realize how incredibly important poetry is to our lives. At the same time, Paul manages just barely to realize all of this himself and what results is a tender, wonderfully romantic, often hilarious, and inspired novel. The Anthologist bears all the beloved hallmarks of Baker's novels: it is witty, erudite, breathtakingly articulate and stylish, and full of the whimsical, compulsive elements that have made its author a worldwide success.  The Other Hand (UK
& Ireland)Little Bee (North America), Chris Cleave "The compelling voice of a refugee illuminates the life-changing friendship between two women that began with a horrifying encounter on a secluded Nigerian beach." We don't want to tell you too much about this book. It is a truly special story and we don't want to spoil it. Nevertheless, you need to know something, so we will just say this: It is extremely funny, but the African beach scene is horrific. The story starts there, but the book doesn't. And it's what happens afterwards that is most important. Once you have read it, you'll want to tell everyone about it. When you do, please don't tell them what happens either. The magic is in how it unfolds.  The Vagrants,Yiyun Li "The execution of a dissident woman reverberates through her small town in the aftermath of China’s Cultural Revolution." In the provincial town of Muddy Waters in China, a young woman named Gu Shan is sentenced to death for her loss of faith in Communism. She is twenty-eight years old and has already spent ten years in prison. The citizens stage a protest after her death and, over the following six weeks, the town goes through uncertainty, hope and fear until eventually the rebellion is brutally suppressed. They are all taken on a painful journey, from one young woman's death to another. We follow the pain of Gu Shan's parents, the hope and fear of the leaders of the protest and their families. Even those who seem unconnected to the tragedy – an eleven-year-old boy seeking fame and glory, a nineteen-year-old village idiot in love with a young and deformed girl, an old couple making a living by scavenging the town's garbage cans – are caught up in a remorseless turn of events. Yiyun Li's novel is based on the true story which took place in China in 1979.  Brooklyn,Colm Tóibín "A young Irish woman faces heart-wrenching decisions in this unabashedly romantic and deceptively simple story of immigration and belonging." In a small town in the south-east of Ireland in the 1950s, Eilis Lacey is one among many of her generation who cannot find work at home. So when a job is offered in America, it is clear that she must go. Leaving her family and home, Eilis sets off to forge a new life for herself in Brooklyn. Young, homesick and alone, she gradually buries the pain of parting beneath the rhythms of a new life - days at the till in a large department store, night classes in Brooklyn College and Friday evenings on the dance floor of the parish hall - until she realises that she has found a sort of happiness. But when tragic news summons her back to Ireland, and the constrictions of her old life unexpectedly give way to new possibilities, she finds herself facing a terrible choice between love and happiness in the land where she belongs and the promises she must keep on the far side of the ocean. Richard Powers "In this postmodern indictment of the biotech industry, a student’s unnerving happiness seems to hold the key to banishing despair from the human genetic code." When Russell Stone becomes the teacher of a young Algerian woman with a disturbingly luminous presence, he is both entranced and troubled. How can this refugee from terror radiate such bliss? Is it possible to be so open and alive without coming to serious harm? Soon, Thassa’s joyful personality comes to the attention of the notorious geneticist and advocate for genomic enhancement, Thomas Kurton, whose research has enabled him to announce his discovery of the genetic underpinnings of happiness. Thassa’s congenital optimism is severely tested by the growing media circus. Devoured by the public as a living prophecy, her genetic secret will transform both Russell and Kurton, as well as the world at large. Toni Morrison "Four women—white, mixed race, black and Native American—become a makeshift family under the care of a “good” man in colonial America." In the 1680s the slave trade was still in its infancy. In the Americas, virulent religious and class division, prejudice and oppression were rife, providing the fertile soil in which slavery and race hatred were carefully planted and took root. Jacob is an Anglo-Dutch trader and adventurer, with a smallholding in the harsh North. Despite his distaste for dealing in ‘flesh’, he takes a small slave girl, in part payment for a bad debt from a plantation owner in Catholic Maryland. This is Florens, ‘with the hands of a slave and the feet of a Portuguese lady’, who can read and write and might be useful on his farm. Florens is hungry for love, at first from the older servant woman at her new master’s house; but later, when she’s sixteen, from the handsome blacksmith, an African, never enslaved, who comes riding into their lives… And all of them have stories: Lina, the native American servant, whose tribe was decimated by smallpox; their mistress Rebekka, herself a victim of religious fervour back in England; young Sorrow, daughter of a sea captain who’s spent too many years at sea to be quite… normal; and, finally, there’s Florens’s own mother back home in Maryland. This is their plight – men and women inventing themselves in the wilderness. A Mercy reveals what lies under the surface of slavery, and the opening chapter of the story of sugar, that great maw which was to eat up millions of lives. But at its heart, like Beloved, this is the ambivalent, disturbing story of a mother and a daughter in a violent ad-hoc world – a world where acts of mercy, like everything else, have unforeseen consequences. |
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Maurice Sendak One night
Max puts on his wolf suit and
makes
mischief of one kind and another, so his mother calls him 'Wild Thing'
and sends him to bed without his supper. That night a forest begins to
grow in Max's room and an ocean rushes by with a boat to take Max to
the place where the wild things are. Max tames the wild things and
crowns himself as their king, and then the wild rumpus begins. But when
Max has sent the monsters to bed, and everything is quiet, he starts to
feel lonely and realises it is time to sail home to the place where
someone loves him best of all.
 And Tango Makes Three,Justin Richardson & Peter Parnell Roy and Silo are just like the
other penguin couples at the zoo - they
bow to each other, walk together and swim together. But Roy and Silo
are a little bit different - they're both boys.
Then, one day, when Mr Gramzay the zookeeper finds them trying to hatch astone, he realises that it may be time for Roy and Silo to become parents for real.  Lost And
Found,Oliver Jeffers There once was a boy… and one
day a penguin arrives on his doorstep.
The boy decides the penguin must be lost and tries to return him. But
no one seems to be missing a penguin. So the boy decides to take the
penguin home himself, and they set out in his row boat on a journey to
the South Pole. But when they get there, the boy discovers that maybe
home wasn’t what the penguin was looking for after all…
Mo Willems Gerald is careful. Piggie is
not. Piggie cannot help smiling. Gerald
can. Gerald worries so that Piggie does not have to. Gerald and Piggie
are best friends. In I Love My New Toy! Piggie can’t wait to
show Gerald her brand-new toy. But will an accidentally broken toy
accidentally break a friendship?
 The Story Of Ferdinand,Munro Leaf All the
other bulls would run and jump and butt
their heads together. But Ferdinand would rather sit and smell the
flowers. So what will happen when our pacifist hero is picked for the
bullfights in Madrid?
 Blueberry
Girl,Neil Gaiman & Charles Vess A book of dreams and wishes for a new born girl, this wonderful celebration of the birth of a child is the perfect christening or ‘birth day’ gift. Neil Gaiman wrote Blueberry Girl for a friend who was about to become the mother of a little girl. He has turned the deeply personal wish for a new daughter into a book that celebrates the glory of growing up. Illustrated throughout with gorgeous art by Charles Vess who also illustrated Gaiman's Stardust.  Winnie-the-Pooh,A.A. Milne In which Pooh goes visiting and Piglet meets a Heffalump. Eeyore loses his tail and Pooh finds one.  The Wind In The Willows,Kenneth Grahame When Mole goes boating with
Ratty instead of doing his spring-cleaning,
he discovers a whole new world. As well as adventures on the river
and
in the Wild Wood, there are high jinks on the open road with that
reckless ruffian, Mr Toad of Toad Hall. Ratty, Mole, Badger and Toad
become the firmest of friends, but after Toad's latest escapade, can
they join together and beat the wretched weasels once and for all?
 The Last Unicorn,Peter S. Beagle This is the story of the last
unicorn on earth. She has lived
contentedly alone for hundreds of years, and would have continued to do
so, believing that there were others of her kind somewhere in the
world, had she not heard a huntsman say that she was the last of her
kind. Afterwards she could have no peace of mind until she left the
safety of the enchanted wood and searched for another unicorn. Once she
leaves the wood she is exposed to the covetous gaze of men and there is
danger at every turn.
 Comet In
Moominland,Tove Jansson A comet is speeding towards Earth and nobody knows what to do! Will it destroy everything and everyone? Moomintroll decides to find out. So, with Sniff, he sets out on an expedition that promises to be packed with adventure and excitement!  The Sword In The Stone,T.H. White When Merlyn the magician comes to tutor Sir Ector's sons Kay and the Wart, schoolwork suddenly becomes much more fun. After all, who wouldn't enjoy being turned into a fish, or a badger, or a snake? But Merlyn has very particular plans for the Wart. The extraordinary story of an ordinary boy who goes on to become King Arthur. |
 His
Dark Materials Trilogy,Philip Pullman His Dark Materials explores the biggest questions of them all - existence, childhood, innocence, knowledge, grace, death and, last but by no means least, that of love. The three volumes of the trilogy, Northern Lights, The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass, are multi-layered and embrace many different themes and facets relevant to us all. At its simplest it is a story of courage and humanity about a boy and a girl with a destiny to fulfill. At its widest it whirls the reader into a universe of wonders and dazzling marvels. Here is a magnificent tale, rich in incident and character, that takes the breath away and leaves the reader with a sense of wonder.  The Outsiders,S.E. Hinton In Ponyboy's world there are two types of people. There are the Socs, the rich society kids who get away with anything. Then there are the greasers, like Ponyboy, who aren't so lucky. Ponyboy has a few things he can count on: his older brothers, his friends, and trouble with the Socs, whose idea of a good time is beating up greasers like Ponyboy. At least he knows what to expect - until the night things go too far...  The Alchemyst,Michael Scott Nicholas Flamel was born in Paris on 28 September 1330. Nearly seven hundred years later, he is acknowledged as the greatest Alchemyst of his day. It is said that he discovered the secret of eternal life. The records show that he died in 1418. But his tomb is empty and Nicholas Flamel lives. The secret of eternal life is hidden within the book he protects – the Book of Abraham the Mage. It’s the most powerful book that has ever existed. In the wrong hands, it will destroy the world. And that’s exactly what Dr. John Dee plans to do when he steals it. Humankind won’t know what’s happening until it’s too late. And if the prophecy is right, Sophie and Josh Newman are the only ones with the power to save the world as we know it. Sometimes legends are true. And Sophie and Josh Newman are about to find themselves in the middle of the greatest legend of all time.  The Invention Of Hugo
Cabret,Brian Selznick Orphan, clock keeper and thief, Hugo lives in the walls of a busy Paris train station, where his survival depends on secrets and anonymity. But when his world suddenly interlocks with an eccentric, bookish girl and a bitter old man who runs a toy booth in the station, Hugo's undercover life, and his most precious secret, are put in jeopardy. A cryptic drawing, a treasured notebook, a stolen key, a mechanical man, and a hidden message from Hugo's dead father form the backbone of this intricate, tender, and spellbinding mystery.  Coraline,Neil Gaiman In Coraline's family's new flat are twenty-one windows and fourteen doors. Thirteen of the doors open and close. The fourteenth is locked, and on the other side is only a brick wall, until the day Coraline unlocks the door to find a passage to another flat in another house just like her own. Only it's different. At first, things seem marvelous in the other flat. But there's another mother, and another father, and they want Coraline to stay with them and be their little girl. They want to change her and never let her go.  The
Lantern Bearers,Rosemary Sutcliffe Rescued as a baby from a shipwrecked Roman galley, Beric is raised in a British tribe but is never fully accepted by them. When disaster and bad times come to the clan, they believe it is down to Beric - that he has brought bad luck and misfortune to them - and they cast him out. Left alone without family or friends, Beric is sold into slavery in Rome and with danger and death all around him, Beric must free himself and try and build a new life.  Cue For Treason,Geoffrey Trease A classic adventure story of danger and intrigue set in the turbulent days of Elizabeth I. Fleeing from the evil Sir Philip Morton, Peter Brownrigg finds himself on the wrong side of the law - and on the run. As he makes his way to London he meets Kit, another runaway, and the two decide to stick together. With luck on their side, they find jobs as apprentices to William Shakespeare, but a chance discovery endangers their lives once more...  Tales From Outer
Suburbia,Shaun Tan Do you remember the water
buffalo at the end of our street? Or the deep-sea diver we found
near the underpass? Do you know why dogs bark in the middle of
the night?
Shaun Tan, creator of The Arrival, The Lost Thing and The Red Tree, reveals the quiet mysteries of everyday life: homemade pets, dangerous weddings, stranded sea mammals, tiny exchange students and secret rooms filled with darkness and delight. |
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