Year 9
Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaarder |
When 14-year-old Sophie encounters a mysterious mentor who introduces her to philosophy, mysteries deepen in her own life. Why does she keep getting postcards addressed to another girl? Who is the other girl? And who, for that matter, is Sophie herself? |
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The Death of Ivan Ilych by Leo Tolstoy |
The Death of Ivan Ilyich tells the story of a high-court judge and his sufferings and death from a terminal illness in 19th-century Russia. |
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Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer |
The true story of Chris McCandless, a young man, who in 1992 walked deep into the Alaskan wilderness and whose SOS note and emaciated corpse were found four months later. The books charts the obsession which leads some people to explore the outer limits of self, leave civilization behind and seek enlightenment through solitude. |
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Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe |
Okonowo is the greatest warrior alive. His fame has spread like a bushfire in West Africa and he is one of the most powerful men of his clan. But he also has a fiery temper. Determined not to be like his father, he refuses to show weakness to anyone - even if the only way he can master his feelings is with his fists. |
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Regeneration by Pat Barker |
Craiglockhart War Hospital, Scotland, 1917, where army psychiatrist William Rivers is treating shell-shocked soldiers. Under his care are the poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen. The closer Rivers gets to mending his patients' minds the harder becomes every decision to send them back to the horrors of the front. |
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I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou |
Maya Angelou beautifully evokes her childhood with her grandmother in the American south of the 1930s. She learns the power of the white folks at the other end of town and suffers the terrible trauma of rape. |
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A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens |
Ebenezer Scrooge believes that 'Every idiot who goes about with "Merry Christmas" on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart'. This attitude is soon challenged when the ghost of his old partner, Jacob Marley, returns from the grave to haunt him on Christmas Eve. |
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