Recommended Reading

The Boy Who Fell Out of the Sky: A True Story
Dornstein, Ken | Random House, © 2006

Dornstein examines the life of his late brother, who was killed in the Lockerbie bombing, and writes a refreshingly personal and uplifting memoir in the process.


Brooklyn Follies
Author Paul Auster

The 60-year-old Nathan Glass returns to Brooklyn after his wife has left him. He is recovering from lung cancer and is looking for a quiet place to die. In Brooklyn he meets his nephew, Tom, whom he has not seen in several years. Tom has seemingly given up on life and has resigned himself to a string of meaningless jobs as he waits for his life to change. They develop a close friendship, entertaining each other in their misery, as they both try to avoid taking part in life.

When Lucy, a little girl who refuses to speak, comes into their lives there is suddenly a bridge between their past and their future that offers both Tom and Nathan some form of redemption.

The Brooklyn Follies contains the classic elements of a Paul Auster novel. The main character is a lonely man, who has suffered an unfortunate reversal. The narrative is based on sudden and randomly happening events and coincidences.

The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is a 2006 novel by John Boyne. This is the first Boyne book written for children.

Unlike the months of planning Boyne had for his other books, he said that he wrote the entire first draft of Boy in two and a half days, barely sleeping until he got to the end. Plot

This book is a story about a nine year old boy trying to understand what is happening around him in (Out-With) Auschwitz during World War II.

The main character, a nine year-old boy called Bruno, is the son of strict commander of a Nazi concentration camp. He has a strong headed sister, Gretel (the Hopeless Case). They live in a five story mansion, but are one day suddenly moved to a place called Out-With (Auschwitz).[4] Bruno, outraged by his father's decision to move to Out-With, and desperate to go home, spends his time in his room with no friends. He is also annoyed by the fact that they live in a three story house instead of their old five-story mansion, and with such a small space, there isn't any room for exploration (a hobby of Bruno's) to be done. He also misses sliding down the banister in their old house.

Atonement (2001) is a novel by British writer Ian McEwan.
It is widely regarded as one of McEwan's best works and was shortlisted for the 2001 Booker Prize for fiction, an award that he had already won for his previous novel, Amsterdam.

McEwan utilizes several important stylistic techniques in the novel, namely metafiction and deliberate ambiguity.

A film adaptation, to be directed by Joe Wright is currently in production for Working Title Films.

Atonement is a complex novel that presents an intricate story told from several points of view.

13-year-old Briony Tallis sees her older sister, Cecilia, having sex with family friend Robbie. Too young and innocent to understand what she is witnessing, her overactive imagination and misguided sense of betrayal lead her to implicate Robbie in a crime he did not commit, the rape of a houseguest, for which he is arrested and imprisoned. Growing to adulthood, Briony must deal with the consequences of what she has done. The events of the novel take place in both England and France, over the span of several years.


No Country for Old Men is a 2005 novel by American author Cormac McCarthy.
Set along the United States–Mexico border in 1980, the story concerns an illicit drug deal gone wrong in a remote desert location. The title comes from the poem "Sailing to Byzantium" by William Butler Yeats.

The plot follows the interweaving paths of the three central characters (Llewelyn Moss, Anton Chigurh, and Ed Tom Bell) set in motion by events related to a drug deal gone bad near the Mexican-American border in southwest Texas in Terrell County in 1980.

Llewelyn Moss is a welder and Vietnam War veteran who stumbles across the aftermath of a drug-related gun battle which has left everyone dead except a single badly wounded Mexican. Moss finds a truck full of heroin and a satchel with $2.4 million in cash. He takes the money, but leaves the Mexican alive, which ignites a hunt for Moss that stretches for most of the remaining novel.

McCarthy tells the story in two voices. The bulk of the book is presented in third person, interspersed with first person reminiscences from Sheriff Bell. The reliance on dialogue and the sketchbook revelation of plot details lend a mystical air to the work.


Goodbye, Columbus (1959) is the title of the first book published by the American novelist Philip Roth, a collection of six stories.

In addition to its title novella, set in New Jersey, Goodbye, Columbus contains the five short stories "The Conversion of the Jews," "Defender of the Faith," "Epstein," "You Can't Tell a Man by the Song He Sings," and "Eli, the Fanatic." Each story deals with the problems and concerns of second and third-generation assimilated American Jews as they leave the ethnic ghettos of their parents and grandparents and go on to college, the white-collar professions, and life in the suburbs.

The book was a critical success for Roth, winning the 1960 National Book Award and earning a name for him as a talented up-and-coming young writer. Still, the book was not without controversy, as certain elements in the Jewish community took issue with Roth's less than flattering portrayal of some of his characters. The short story Defender of the Faith, about a Jewish drill sergeant who is exploited by three shirking, co-religionist draftees, drew particular ire. When Roth in 1962 appeared on a panel alongside the distinguished black novelist Ralph Ellison to discuss minority representation in literature, the questions directed at him soon turned into denunciations. Many accused Roth of being a self-hating Jew, a label that would stick with him for much of his career. It is often speculated that the wildly obscene comedy of Portnoy's Complaint (1969) was Roth's defiant reply to his early Jewish critics.


From Wikipedia. More at Wikipedia