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Recommended for Wide Reading RECOMMENDED FICTION FOR WIDE READING YEARS 11 & 12 www.harpercollins.com.au 25 RYDE ROAD, PYMBLE, NSW, 2073 GIRL MADE OF DUST Nathalie Abi-Ezzi 9780007259038 Ten–year–old Ruba lives in a village outside Beirut. From her family home, she can see the buildings shimmering on the horizon and the sea stretched out beside them. She can also hear the rumble of the shelling – this is Lebanon in the 1980s and civil war is tearing the country apart. Ruba however has her own worries. Her father hardly ever speaks and spends most of his days sitting in his armchair, avoiding work and family. Her mother looks so sad that Ruba thinks her heart might have withered in the heat like a fig. Her elder brother, Naji, has started to spend his time with older boys – and some of them have guns. When Ruba decides she has to save her father, and when she uncovers his secret, she begins a journey which takes her from childhood to the beginnings of adulthood. As Israeli troops invade and danger comes ever closer, she realises that she may not be able to keep her family safe. This is a first novel with tremendous heart, which captures both a country and a childhood in turmoil. HALF OF A YELLOW SUN Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 9780007200283 Set in Nigeria during the 1960s at the time of a vicious civil war in which a million people died and thousands were massacred in cold blood. The three main characters in the novel are swept up in the violence during these turbulent years. One is a young boy from a poor village who is employed at a university lecturer's house. The other is a young middle–class woman, Olanna, who has to confront the reality of the massacre of her relatives. And the third is a white man, a writer who lives in Nigeria for no clear reason, and who falls in love with Olanna's sister, a remote and enigmatic character. As these people's lives intersect, they have to question their own responses to the unfolding political events. This extraordinary novel is about Africa in a wider sense: about moral responsibility, about the end of colonialism, about ethnic allegiances, about class and race; and the ways in which love can complicate all of these things. * WINNER: 2007 ORANGE PRIZE * Reading Notes available. PURPLE HIBISCUS Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 9780007189885 The limits of fifteen–year–old Kambili's world are defined by the high walls of her family estate and the dictates of her repressive and fanatically religious father. Her life is regulated by schedules: prayer, sleep, study, and more prayer. When Nigeria begins to fall apart during a military coup, Kambili's father, involved mysteriously in the political crisis, sends Kambili and her brother away to live with their aunt. In this house, full of energy and laughter, she discovers life and love – and a terrible, bruising secret deep within her family. Centering on the promise of freedom and the pain and exhilaration of adolescence, Purple Hibiscus is the extraordinary debut of a remarkable new talent. *WINNER: COMMONWEALTH WRITERS’ PRIZE. * Teaching Notes available. Reading Group Notes available. LOST CITY RADIO Daniel Alarcon 9780007200528 Ever since the civil war that took her husband ended, Norma has been the voice of consolation to a people broken by violence. Every week, bereft families listen to her radio show as she reads out the names of the missing, those who vanished in the clamour and brutality of the drawn–out conflict, with the hope of reuniting the few survivors with their families. Successes are few; her true gift is the offer of hope. Although her face is unknown to her listeners, her name and spirit are celebrated by a wayward nation searching for a guiding force. But her life is forever changed when a young boy from a jungle village enters her radio studio and provides a connection to the husband she thought lost – the husband she has not seen for ten years since departing for the war. Stunning, timely, powerful and absolutely mesmerizing, 'Lost City Radio' probes the deepest questions of war: from its wide reaching effect on a society to its intimate emotional impact on every person involved. This searing yet tender first novel marks Alarcón's emergence as a new voice in American fiction, fully–formed and ready to be heard. NOCTURNE Diane Armstrong 9780732284305 She closed her eyes and listened to the forbidden Chopin nocturne ... its magic hung in the air. It is Warsaw, 1939, and Elzunia is an indulged teenager who longs for a heroic life filled with romance. But the outbreak of war shatters all her dreams. As bombs fall, she meets Adam, a taciturn airman whose fate becomes entwined with hers. In despair over the occupation, Adam joins the Polish resistance, then flies bombers for the RAF. Forced into the Warsaw Ghetto, Elzunia learns that even children must create their own rules to survive. When the Ghetto defies the invaders, and later the entire city of Warsaw rises up, Elzunia finds strength in ways she never imagined. Nocturne is a powerful and inspiring testament to resilience and courage in the face of cruelty and betrayal. * Reading Notes available. WINTER JOURNEY Diane Armstrong 9780732276959 A community bound by a terrible secret ... and an extraordinary sacrifice to save a child. Polish–born Halina Shore is a forensic dentist working in Sydney. Her mother has just died, and while going through her papers she comes across a letter from a woman she has never heard of, asking about a strange child. Intrigued, Halina sets out to learn more. Meanwhile, a war crimes tribunal is about to undertake an investigation into a mass grave in Poland, believed to be the site of the massacre of the entire Jewish population of a village during the war. Halina is asked to assist. As Halina's story unfolds, she must confront not only the grimmest of evils, but the truth about her own past – and that the human spirit is a far bolder and more courageous thing than she could ever have imagined ... *Reading Notes available. HARMONY SILK FACTORY Tash Aw 9780007232284 Set in Malaysia in the 1930s and 40s, with the rumbling of the Second World War in the background and the Japanese about to invade, The Harmony Silk Factory is the story of four people: Johnny, an infamous Chinaman – a salesman, a fraudster, possibly a murderer – whose shop house, The Harmony Silk Factory, he uses as a front for his illegal businesses; Snow Soong, the beautiful daughter of one of the Kinta Valley's most prominent families, who dies giving birth to one of the novel's narrators; Kunichika, a Japanese officer who loves Snow too; and an Englishman, Peter Wormwood, who went to Malaysia like many English but never came back, who also loved Snow to the end of his life. A journey the four of them take into the jungle has a devastating effect on all of them, and brilliantly exposes the cultural tensions of the era. Haunting, highly original, The Harmony Silk Factory is suspenseful to the last page. * Reading Notes available EMPIRE OF THE SUN J.G. Ballard 9780007221523 Based on J. G. Ballard's own childhood, this is the extraordinary account of a boy's life in Japanese– occupied wartime Shanghai – a mesmerising, hypnotically compelling novel of war, of starvation and survival, of internment camps and death marches. It blends searing honesty with an almost hallucinatory vision of a world thrown utterly out of joint. Rooted as it is in the author's own disturbing experience of war in his own time, it is one of a handful of novels by which the twentieth century will be not only remembered but judged. THE LACE READER Brunonia Barry 9780007287093 Towner Whitney comes from a family of Salem women who can read the future in the patterns in lace, and who have guarded a history of secrets going back for generations. Exiled in California, she receives a phone call telling her that her beloved Great Aunt Eva has disappeared and Towner must return to her home after an absence of 17 years... A literary page–turner with depth, narrative power and a story that novels like 'The Thirteenth Tale' can only dream of, 'The Lace Reader' is a bewitching and tightly plotted read. BUSH STUDIES Barbara Baynton 9780207196423 Written during the 1890's, Bush Studies presents a bleak and uncompromising, yet poignant and revealing image of life in the Australian bush. These are not the stories of mates gathered round the fire, but of the dark loneliness of women. Not only are there fences to be built and a living to be coaxed from the land, but babies to be born – or buried – and the dangers of profound isolation to be endured, as well as the cruelties, or plain disappointments of men. *Teaching Notes available GALLIPOLI Jack Bennett 9780732282271 Novel based on David Williamson's screenplay for Peter Weir's classic Australian film, Gallipoli (originally released in 1981, starring Mel Gibson). On the morning of 25 April 1915, the first wave of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps landed on the Gallipoli Peninsula under intense Turkish fire. When the Anzacs crept away, defeated, eight months later, 7594 Australians had been killed and more than 19,000 had been wounded. About one–fifth of the men engaged in this tragic and mismanaged encounter were under the age of 21 – boys who were fired with loyalty for a nation itself not yet 15 years old. ‘This is the story of two of those boys.’ CAPE GRIMM Carmel Bird 9780732269937 On the far northwest coast of Tasmania at Cape Grimm lies the isolated community of Skye, which practises a religion that reveres the imagination.
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