Randa Abdel-Fattah

YF ABD

Welcome to my world. Im Amal Abdel-Hakim, a sixteen-year old Australian-Palestinian-Muslim still getting to grips with my various identity hyphens. Its hard enough to be cool as a teenager when being one issue behind the Cosmo disqualifies you from the in-group. Try wearing a veil on your head and getting in the bums up postion at lunchtime and you know you're in for a tough time. Luckily my friends support me, although they've got a few troubles of their own. Simone, blonde and gorgeous, has got serious image issues, and Leila's really intelligent but her parents are more interested in her getting a marriage certificate than her high school certificate. And I thought I had problems ...

Richard Adams

JF ADA

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

F ADI

In the city of Enugu, Nigeria, fifteen-year-old Kambili and her older brother, Jaja, lead a privileged life. Their Papa is a wealthy and respected businessman they live in a beautiful house and they attend an exclusive missionary school. But, as Kambili reveals in her tender-voiced account, their home life is anything but harmonious. Her father, a fanatically religious man, has impossible expectations of his children and wife, and severely punishes them if they're less than perfect. Home is silent and suffocating. When Kambili's loving and outspoken Aunty Ifeoma persuades her brother that the children should visit her in Nsukka, Kambili and Jaja take their first trip away from home. Once inside their Aunty Ifeoma's flat, they discover a whole new world. Books cram the shelves, curry and nutmeg permeate the air, and their cousins' laughter rings throughout the house. Jaja learns to garden and work with his hands, and Kambili secretly falls in love with a young charismatic priest. When a military coup threatens to destroy the country and Kambili and Jaja return home changed by their newfound freedom, tension within the family escalates. And Kambili must find the strength to keep her loved ones together after her mother commits a desperate act.

Nadeem Aslam

F ASL

Somewhere in England, not long ago... In an unnamed town Jugnu and his lover Chanda have disappeared. Rumours abound in the close-knit Pakistani community, and then on a snow-covered January morning Chandra's brothers are arrested for murder. Maps for Lost Lovers tells the story of the next twelve months. What follows is an unravelling of all that is sacred to Jugnu's brother and sister-in-law, Shamas and Kaukab. As the seasons pass Kaukab tries desperately to maintain her Islamic piety as she struggles to come to terms with the double murder and its corrosive effect on her family.

Fleur Beale

YF z BEA

When Kirby's mother tells her she is going away for two years, and is leaving her with relatives she's never heard of, it is every teenage girl's nightmare. These relatives are members of a closed religious sect. They have no television, radio, newspapers or mirrors and Kirby must wear long, modest clothes and behave in a 'Godly' way, or else. They even give her a new biblical name, Esther.

Ronan Bennett

F BEN

England in the 1630s - an unsettled country in turbulent times. People are gripped by fear: fear of crime and disorder, of foreign invasion, of Catholic conspiracies, of the vagrant poor. In Halifax in northern England a group of Puritan reformers tightens its hold on the lives of the inhabitants. John Brigge is the local coroner, a respected man who wants nothing more than to work his farm and be with his wife, now expecting their first child. But when he is called to investigate an infanticide, Brigge finds himself drawn unwillingly into a vicious power struggle.

Geraldine Brooks

F BRO

In 1996, Hanna Heath, a young Australian book conservator is called to analyse the famed Sarajevo Haggadah, a priceless six-hundred-year-old Jewish prayer book that has been salvaged from a destroyed Bosnian library. When Hanna discovers a series of artifacts in the centuries' old binding, she unwittingly exposes an international cover up.

Geraldine Brooks

F BRO

This is the story of a young woman's struggle to save her family and her soul during the most extraordinary year of 1666, when plague suddenly visited a small Derbyshire village and the villagers, inspired by a charismatic preacher, elected to quarantine themselves to limit the contagion.

Orson Scott Card

SCFI CAR

Alvin Maker, the seventh son of a seventh son, who has remarkable psychic powers, is born into a world of hexes and folk magic.

Peter Carey

F CAR

Set on board an ocean liner travelling to Australia in 1864, this novel is both a love story and an historical tour de force that relates the developing romance between Oscar Hopkins, an Oxford seminarian, and Lucinda Leplastrier, a Sydney heiress with a fascination for glass.

Margaret Elphinstone

F ELP

It is 1810 in England. Mark Greenhow, a young farmer, leaves his small community on a vast journey. His sister, Rachel, a missionary travelling in the USA and Canada, is lost and presumed dead in the uncharted wilderness. What follows is an account of Mark's journey to find his sister.

Leif Enger

ADV ENG

Eleven-year-old Reuben shares the story of how his father, trying to raise his sons alone in 1960s Minnesota, takes their family on a quest to find Reuben's older brother, who has been charged with murder.

Graham Greene

F GRE

During an anti-clerical purge in Mexico, a priest is hunted like a hare. Too human for heroism, too humble for martyrdom, the little worldly priest is nevertheless impelled towards his squalid Calvary as much by his own compassion for humanity as by the efforts of his pursuers.

Khaled Hosseini

F HOS

Winter, 1975: Afghanistan, a country on the verge of an internal coup. Twelve year old Amir is desperate to win the approval of his father, one of the richest merchants in Kabul. He's failed to do so through academia or brawn but the one area they connect is the annual kite fighting tournament.

Khaled Hosseini

F HOS

Mariam is only fifteen when she is sent to Kabul to marry the troubled and bitter Rasheed, who is thirty years her senior. Nearly two decades later, in a climate of growing unrest, tragedy strikes fifteen-year-old Laila, who must leave her home and join Mariam's unhappy household. Laila and Mariam are to find consolation in each other, their friendship to grow as deep as the bond between sisters, as strong as the ties between mother and daughter. With the passing of time comes Taliban rule over Afghanistan, the streets of Kabul loud with the sound of gunfire and bombs, life a desperate struggle against starvation, brutality and fear, the women's endurance tested beyond their worst imaginings. Yet love can move a person to act in unexpected ways, lead them to overcome the most daunting obstacles with a startling heroism.

Barbara Kingsolver

F KIN

The Poisonwood Bible is a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it--from garden seeds to Scripture--is calamitously transformed on African soil. What follows is a suspenseful epic of one family's tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the course of three decades in postcolonial Africa.

Iris Murdoch

F MUR

A lay community is encamped outside Imber Abbey, Gloucestershire, home of an enclosed order of nuns. A new bell is being installed and then the old bell, legendary symbol of religion and magic, is rediscovered.

Jodi Picoult

F PIC

When Ellie Hathaway decides to defend an unmarried Amish woman against the charge of the murder of her own child, the urban-savvy defence attorney finds herself caught in a clash of cultures with a people whose channels of justice are markedly different from her own.

Francine Rivers

F RIV

Set in Appalachia in the 1850s amid a community committed to its myth of a human sin eater, who absolves the dead of their sins. Follows the exploits of ten-year-old Cadi, who, intrigued by the sin eater , who appears at the graveside of her grandmother, goes in search of the elusive figure to have her sins absolved now -- rather than waiting until her death.

Marjane Satrapi

AGN SAT

Persepolis is Marjane Satrapi's wise, funny, and heartbreaking memoir of growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution. In powerful black-and-white comic strip images, Satrapi tells the story of her life in Tehran from ages six to fourteen, years that saw the overthrow of the Shah's regime, the triumph of the Islamic Revolution, and the devastating effects of war with Iraq. The intelligent and outspoken only child of committed Marxists and the great-granddaughter of one of Iran's last emperors, Marjane bears witness to a childhood uniquely entwined with the history of her country. Persepolis paints an unforgettable portrait of daily life in Iran: the bewildering contradictions between home life and public life and the toll repressive regimes exact on the individual spirit. Marjane's child's-eye-view of dethroned emperors, state-sanctioned whippings, and heroes of the revolution allows us to learn as she does the history of this fascinating country and of her own extraordinary family. Intensely personal, profoundly political, and wholly original, Persepolis is at once a story of growing up and a reminder of the human cost of war and political repression. It shows how we carry on, with laughter and tears, in the face of absurdity. And, finally, it introduces us to an irresistible little girl with whom we cannot help but fall in love. --BOOK JACKET.

Anthony Trollope

F TRO

Septimus Harding is an unworldly, cello-playing clergyman, beloved by the pensioners of Barchester's almshouse, of which he is warden. When ecclesiastical and political skulduggery engulf him, he is pulled in two directions.

Salley Vickers

F VIC

Following the death of her long-time companion, Harriet, Miss Julia Garnet , a retired British schoolteacher, decides to take an appartment in Venice for six months. Venice has a magical effect on reserved Julia: a dyed-in-the-wool Communist, she relaxes in her antipathy toward religion, and even begins to visit the local church. There, she becomes enamored of a series of paintings that tell the story of the Apocryphal book of Tobit, and his journey with the Archangel Raphael. Julia falls in love with an art dealer, Carlo, and befriends Sarah and Toby, twins working on the restoration of a Venetian chapel. When Toby disappears suddenly, after discovering a priceless Renaissance painting, Julia finds out that neither Carlo nor the twins are exactly what they seem--but that the Angel Raphael's watchful spirit will help good prevail.

Judy Blume

JF BLU

Faced with the difficulties of growing up and choosing a religion, a 12-year-old girl talks over with her own private God.