This list aims to offer reading recommendations to the students and staff of Alleyn's School. You can search for books in four ways. By category on the left or, if you know what you're looking for, by using the search box just below the list of categories. Be inspired by our most recent entries on the right or by accessing the full record of all previous entries that appears lower down the page, also on the right, organised by their date of entry. Happy browsing!
Hearn is skilled at conveying the place and the time, but it is in the detail of human interactions that her novel is particularly remarkable.TheSunday Times
Rowan the Strange works perfectly as a strangely beautiful...story. It is nothing short of extraordinary.
The Guardian
How does a doctor examine a person's brain?
They won't use any knives on me, will they?
Rowan knows he is strange. But dangerous?
He didn't mean to scare his sister. In his right mind, he wouldn't hurt a fly.
But there's a place he can go where they say they can fix his mind . . .
Beyond the bars on the window, England is at war.
Behind them, Rowan's own battle is only just beginning.
This amazing story gives a thought-provoking look at life in an asylum and the experimental treatments practised at the start of the Second World War. For Rowan, nobody could ever have predicted the effect these treatments would have...
At the age of eight, Julie wrote her first novel about a psychedelic dragon who longed to be plain green or brown. Sadly her teacher didn't have time to read the story and Julie vowed never to write anything that ambitious again!
Julie went on to become a journalist. She wrote for a daily newspaper in Australia, then lived in Spain for a while, before returning to England and working as a features editor and 'mother and baby' columnist. In 1994, Julie started a degree in Education, but switched to English when she realized teaching wasn't for her.
She then went on to complete a Master of Studies at Oxford University in Women's Studies, but found academia creatively restrictive. An idea for her Masters thesis became her inspiration for Follow Me Down. Julie lives in Oxfordshire and has one daughter, Tilly.
What happens when innocence is confronted by monstrous evil?
Lines may divide us, but hope will unite us . . .
Nine-year-old Bruno knows nothing of the Final Solution and the Holocaust. He is oblivious to the appalling cruelties being inflicted on the people of Europe by his country. All he knows is that he has been moved from a comfortable home in Berlin to a house in a desolate area where there is nothing to do and no one to play with. Until he meets Shmuel, a boy who lives a strange parallel existence on the other side of the adjoining wire fence and who, like the other people there, wears a uniform of striped pyjamas.
Bruno's friendship with Shmuel will take him from innocence to revelation. And in exploring what he is unwittingly a part of, he will inevitably become subsumed by the terrible process.
The Boy in Striped Pyjamas will no doubt acquire many readers as a result of the subsequent film of the novel, but viewers of the latter would do themselves a favour by going back to the spare and powerfully affecting original book.
Bruno is nine years old, and the Nazis’ horrific Final Solution to the ‘Jewish Problem’ means nothing to him. He's completely unaware of the barbarity of Germany under Hitler, and is more concerned by his move from his well-appointed house in Berlin to a far less salubrious area where he finds himself with nothing to do.
Then he meets a boy called Shmuel who lives a very different life from him - a life on the opposite side of a wire fence. And Shmuel is the eponymous boy in the striped pyjamas, as are all the other people on the other side of the fence. The friendship between the two boys begins to grow, but for Bruno it is a journey from blissful ignorance to a painful knowledge. And he will find that this learning process carries, for him, a daunting price.
A legion of books have attempted to evoke the horrors of the Second World War, but in this concise and perfectly honed novel, all of the effects that John Boyne creates are allowed to make a maximum impact in a relatively understated fashion (given the enormity of the situation here). The Boy in Striped Pyjamas is also that rare thing: a novel which can affect both children and adults equally; a worthy successor, in fact, to such masterpieces as To Kill a Mockingbird and The Catcher in the Rye -- both, of course, books, dealing (as does this one) with the loss of innocence. - Barry Forshaw
The winner of two Irish Book Awards, he is the author of seven novels, including the international bestseller The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, which was made into a Miramax feature film and has sold more than five million copies worldwide.
His novels are published in over forty languages. He lives in Dublin.
Longlisted for the Guardian Children's Fiction prize 2010
Morris Gleitzman's acclaimed story of friends Felix and Zelda in Nazi-occupied Poland has captured the hearts and minds of readers worldwide. In Now he delivers the final chapter, bringing this most moving of stories into the present day.
I'm a big fan of Morris Gleitzman's highly underrated WWII series, and have been anticipating this title since I first read Once and Then over a year ago. Now is set in present day Australia and, though it's not the best of the trilogy, it's a brilliant end to Felix's heartbreaking but ultimately hopeful story.
Gleitzman's series has been consistently shocking, funny and important, and has mostly focused on Felix as a young boy. In Now, Felix is an old man, with a successful life and a loving family, including 11-year-old granddaughter Zelda. Her namesake comes from Felix's best friend Zelda, who heavily features in Once and Then, and who assists him in his bid to survive the Holocaust. It's a name that carries a lot of history for Felix, and is a name that his granddaughter is desperate to live up to.
A natural disaster strikes Felix's home, forcing both grandfather and granddaughter into confronting their demons, their fears and some home truths. Their relationship grows even more, as Zelda tries to help Felix come to terms with what he lost in the 1940s. It's not quite as heart-wrenching as Then, though I did tear up a few times as Felix relived his nightmare of a past.
As with previous books in the series, I wanted more, and could have read three times the relatively short page count. I love Felix, both as an innocent child and as a wise old man. He's the epitome of the word good, and is a fictional testament to all those people who survived the horrific events of the Holocaust. I'll never forget his story, or the stories of the real survivors who lived on to tell their tales. A Wondrous Reads Review.
Morris Gleitzman was born in Lincolnshire and moved to Australia in his teens. He worked as a paperboy, a shelf-stacker, a frozen chicken de-froster, an assistant to a fashion designer and more, before taking a degree in Professional Writing at Canberra College and becoming a writer. He has written for TV, stage, newspapers and magazines but is best known for his hugely successful children's books including TwoWeekswith the Queen, Bumface, Once and Then.
'Atonement is a magnificent novel, shaped and paced with awesome confidence and eloquence.'The Independent
Atonement is Ian McEwan's ninth novel and his first since the Booker Prize-winning Amsterdam in 1998. But whereas Amsterdam was a slim, sleek piece, Atonement is a more sturdy, ambitious work, allowing McEwan more room to play, think and experiment.
We meet 13-year-old Briony Tallis in the summer of 1935, as she attempts to stage a production of her new drama The Trials of Arabella to welcome home her elder, idolised brother Leon. But she soon discovers that her cousins, the glamorous Lola and the twin boys Jackson and Pierrot, aren't up to the task, and directorial ambitions are abandoned as more interesting preoccupations come onto the scene.
The charlady's son Robbie Turner appears to be forcing Briony's sister Cecilia to strip in the Fountain and sends her obscene letters; Leon has brought home a dim chocolate magnate keen for a war to promote his new "Army Amo" bar; and upstairs Briony's migraine-stricken mother Emily keeps tabs on the house from her bed. Soon, secrets emerge that change the lives of everyone present...
The interwar upper-middle-class setting of the book's long, masterfully sustained opening section might recall Virginia Woolf or Henry Green, but as we move forward--eventually to the turn of the 21st century--the novel's central concerns emerge, and McEwan's voice becomes clear, even personal. For at heart, Atonement is about the pleasures, pains and dangers of writing, and perhaps even more, about the challenge of controlling what readers make of your writing. McEwan shouldn't have any doubts about readers of Atonement: this is a thoughtful, provocative and at times moving book that will have readers applauding. Alan Stewart
About the Author
Ian McEwan is a critically acclaimed author of short stories and novels for adults, as well as The Daydreamer, a children's novel illustrated by Anthony Browne. His first published work, a collection of short stories, First Love, Last Rites, won the Somerset Maugham Award. His novels include The Child in Time, which won the 1987 Whitbread Novel of the Year Award, The Cement Garden, Enduring Love, Amsterdam, which won the 1998 Booker Prize, Atonement, Saturday and On Chesil Beach.
Here's the trailer for the 2007 film version starring Keira Knightley and James MacAvoy...
Dylan is the only boy living in the tiny Welsh town of Manod. His parents run the Snowdonia Oasis Auto Marvel garage - and when he's not trying to persuade his sisters to play football, Dylan is in charge of the petrol log. And that means he gets to keep track of everyone coming in and out of Manod - what car they drive, what they're called, even their favourite flavour of crisps.
But when a mysterious convoy of lorries trundles up the misty mountainside towards an old, disused mine, even Dylan is confounded. Who are these people - and what have they got to hide?
A story inspired by a press cutting describing how, during WWII, the treasured contents of London's National Gallery were stored in Welsh slate mines. Once a month, a morale-boosting masterpiece would be unveiled in the village and then returned to London for viewing. This is a funny and touching exploration of how Art - its beauty and its value - touches the life of one little boy and his big family in a very small town.
'The best piece of fiction in English I've read in years'
Financial Times
'Masterful...a rich and compelling work of fiction'
Don de Lillo
'The English Patient wears the triple crown: it is profound, beautiful and heart-quickening'
Toni Morrison
Haunting and harrowing, as beautiful as it is disturbing, The English Patient tells the story of the entanglement of four damaged lives in an Italian monastery as the second world war ends.
The exhausted nurse, Hana; the maimed thief, Caravaggio; the wary sapper, Kip: each is haunted by the riddle of the English patient, the nameless, burn victim who lies in an upstairs room and whose memories of passion, betrayal and rescue illuminate this book like flashes of sheet lightning.
In lyrical prose informed by a poetic consciousness, Michael Ondaatje weaves these characters together, pulls them tight, then unravels the threads with unsettling acumen.
The final curtain is closing on the Second World War, and Hana, a nurse, stays behind in an abandoned Italian villa to tend to her only remaining patient.
Rescued by Bedouins from a burning plane, he is English, anonymous, damaged beyond recognition and haunted by his memories of passion and betrayal. The only clue Hana has to his past is the one thing he clung on to through the fire - a copy of The Histories by Herodotus, covered with hand-written notes describing a painful and ultimately tragic love affair.
'An emotional, funny, stunning novel which swings with wide smoothness between joy and bleakness, personal lives and history…it's lyrical and angry, satirical and earnest'Observer
'Among de Bernieres's skills are an archaeologists's eye for place, a historian's feel for time and a musician's ear for tone and tempo - the novel has everything, including a happy ending (of sorts). If Captain Corelli's Mandolin does not hold you in its thrall, it might be worth checking to see if your heart is made of stone.' Daily Telegraph
Beginning in 1940, as Italy prepares to attack Greece and enter the Second World War on the side of the Germans, Captain Corelli's Mandolin tells the story of Pelagia, the beautiful young daughter of Dr Iannis.
Engaged to Mandras, a handsome young fisherman, Pelagia is left alone when war intervenes and Mandras enlists. Following the invasion of the island by the Italians, Captain Antonio Corelli, a young and far from fanatical artillery captain with a passion for music, is billeted with Pelagia and her father.
As the Italian occupiers and Greek islanders begin to come to terms with each other, so Pelagia's love for Mandras falters and her affection for the charming and civilised Corelli grows. As an increasingly bestial war comes closer and closer, Corelli and Pelagia find themselves united by their love but divided by their nationality and by the savagery of war.
British author Louis de Bernières is well known for his forays into magical realism in such novels as The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts and The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman. Here he keeps it to a minimum, though certainly the secondary characters with whom he populates his island - the drunken priest, the strongman, the fisherman who swims with dolphins - would be at home in any of his wildly imaginative Latin American fictions. Instead, de Bernières seems interested in dissecting the nature of history as he tells his ever-darkening tale from many different perspectives. Captain Corelli's Mandolin works on many levels, as a love story, a war story and a deconstruction of just what determines the facts that make it into the history books.
About the Author
Louis de Bernières was born in London in 1954. He joined the army at 18 but left after spending four months at Sandhurst. After graduating from the Victoria University of Manchester, he took a postgraduate certificate in Education at Leicester Polytechnic and obtained his MA at the University of London.
Before writing full-time, he held many varied jobs including landscape gardener, motorcycle messenger and car mechanic. He also taught English in Colombia, an experience which determined the style and setting of his first three novels, The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts (1990), Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord (1991) and The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman (1992), each of which was heavily influenced by South American literature, particularly 'magic realism'.
In 1993, he was selected as one of the 20 'Best of Young British Novelists 2' promotion in Granta magazine. His fourth novel, Captain Corelli's Mandolin, was published in the following year, winning the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Best Book). It was also shortlisted for the Sunday Express Book of the Year. Set on the Greek island of Cephalonia during the Second World War, the novel tells the story of a love affair between the daughter of a local doctor and an Italian soldier. It has become a worldwide bestseller and has now been translated into over 30 languages. A film adaptation of the novel was released in 2001, and the novel has also been adapted for the stage. In 2001, Red Dog was published - a collection of stories inspired by a statue of a dog encountered on a trip to a writers' festival in Australia in 1998.
He wrote the introduction to The Book of Job, one in a series of books reprinted from the Bible and published individually by Canongate Press in 1998 and his play, Sunday Morning at the Centre of the World, set in South-West London, was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 1999, and published in 2001. He is also a regular contributor of short stories to various newspapers and magazines. His novel Birds Without Wings (2004) was shortlisted for the 2004 Whitbread Novel Award and the 2005 Commonwealth Writers Prize.
His latest novel is A Partisan's Daughter (2008), shortlisted for the 2008 Costal Novel Award. In 2009, he published a collection of short stories, Notwithstanding.
Here's the trailer to the not entirely successful or critically well-received 2001 film version. At least it will give you an idea of what the island of Cephallonia looks like.
'.... not just the best book so far written for children about the Second World War, but also a metaphor for now.'Aidan Chambers, Times Literary Supplement
'Some bright kid's got a gun and 2000 rounds of live ammo. And that gun's no peashooter. It'll go through a brick wall at a quarter of a mile.'
Chas McGill has the second-best collection of war souvenirs in Garmouth, and he desperately wants it to be the best. When he stumbles across the remains of a German bomber crashed in the woods - its shiny, black machine-gun still intact - he grabs his chance. Soon he's masterminding his own war effort with dangerous and unexpected results....
About the Author
Robert Westall made a sensational debut with THE MACHINE GUNNERS in 1975. It won the Carnegie Medal and Westall established an international reputation. His books have been translated into ten languages and dramatised for television. He won The Smarties Prize, the Guardian Award and was twice awarded The Carnegie Medal.
"Westall was a writer of rare talent. We shall miss him but he has left us such a wonderful legacy."Michael Morpurgo
Unsettling, thought-provoking, life-affirming, triumphant and tragic, this is a novel of breath-taking scope, masterfully told...A wonderful page-turner.
The Guardian
The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak was the best-selling debut literary novel of the year 2007, selling over 400,000 copies.
The book is extraordinary on many levels: moving, yet restrained, angry yet balanced -- and written with the kind of elegance found all too rarely in fiction these days. The book's narrator is nothing less than Death itself, regaling us with a remarkable tale of book burnings, treachery and theft. The book never forgets the primary purpose of compelling the reader's attention, yet which nevertheless is able to impart a cogent message about the importance of words, particularly in those societies which regard the word as dangerous (the book is set during the Nazi regime, but this message is all too relevant in many places in the world today).
Nine-year-old Liesel lives with her foster family on Himmel Street during the dark days of the Third Reich. Her Communist parents have been transported to a concentration camp, and during the funeral for her brother, she manages to steal a macabre book: it is, in fact, a gravediggers’ instruction manual. This is the first of many books which will pass through her hands as the carnage of the Second World War begins to hungrily claim lives. Both Liesel and her fellow inhabitants of Himmel Street will find themselves changed by both words on the printed page and the horrendous events happening around them.
Despite its grim narrator, The Book Thief is, in fact, a life-affirming book, celebrating the power of words and their ability to provide sustenance to the soul. Interestingly, the Second World War setting of the novel does not limit its relevance: in the 20th century, totalitarian censorship throughout the world is as keen as ever at suppressing books (notably in countries where the suppression of human beings is also par for the course) and that other assault on words represented by the increasing dumbing-down of Western society as cheap celebrity replaces the appeal of books for many people, ensures that the message of Marcus Zusak’s book could not be more timely. It is, in fact, required reading -- or should be in any civilised country. Barry Forshaw.
