Michael Gerard Bauer
YF BAU
Tom Leyton, a reclusive Vietnam veteran, has been the subject of rumour and gossip for thirty years. When Joseph Davidson, his young neighbour and a talented artist, is asked to draw a portrait of him, an uneasy relationship begins to unfold, one that will force each of them to confront his darkest secrets.
Malorie Blackman
YF BLA
Malorie Blackman tackles the issues of racism and prejudice in a world set in an alternate historical reality.
Kevin Brooks
YF BRO
On an isolated English island, fifteen-year-old Caitlin McCann makes the painful journey from adolescence to adulthood through her experiences with a mysterious boy, whose presence has an unsettling effect on the island's inhabitants.
Ted Dawe
NZ YF DAW
Trace is sick of small town life. He moves to Auckland and finds himself rooming with Devon who's cynical, charismatic and seems to know what he's playing at. Trace is soon embroiled in street-racing, then crime and drugs - he's messing with a world of strict codes and brutal enforcement.
Janet Frame
NZ F FRA
In A state of siege (first published in 1966) art teacher Malfred Signal attempts to reinvent herself. She leaves her repressed past and domineering family behind, and moves from Otago to Auckland to live on a sub-tropical island. But who is knocking at the door one stormy night? The Rainbirds is about a man who makes a new life, only to spoil it by being mistakenly pronounced dead. These compelling novels explore identity and exclusion how we see the world and the world sees us how free we really are.
Mark Haddon
F HAD
A murder mystery like no other, this novel features Christopher Boone, a 15 year-old who suffers from Asperger's syndrome. When he finds a neighbour's dog murdered, he sets out on a terrifying journey destined to turn his whole world upside down.
S. E Hinton
YF HIN
The struggle of three brothers to stay together after their parent's death and their quest for identity among the conflicting values of their adolescent society.
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Witi Tame Ihimaera
F z IHI
The whale rider was Kahutia Te Rangi. Ancestor of the people of Te Tai Rawhiti, he travelled from Hawaiki, the place of the Ancients, to the East Coat of New Zealand. Then there was Kahu. The first great-grandchild of the whanau, she was loved by all her relatives except the one whose love she needed most, her great-grandfather.
Ken Kesey
F KES
An international bestseller and the basis for a hugely successful film, Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was one of the defining works of the 1960s. A mordant, wickedly subversive parable set in a mental ward, the novel chronicles the head-on collision between its hell-raising, life-affirming hero Randle Patrick McMurphy and the totalitarian rule of Big Nurse. McMurphy swaggers into the mental ward like a blast of fresh air and turns the place upside down, starting a gambling operation, smuggling in wine and women, and egging on the other patients to join him in open rebellion. But McMurphy's revolution against Big Nurse and everything she stands for quickly turns from sport to a fierce power struggle with shattering results. With One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Kesey created a work without precedent in American literature, a novel at once comic and tragic that probes the nature of madness and sanity, authority and vitality. Greeted by unanimous acclaim when it was first published, the book has become and enduring favorite of readers.
Doris May Lessing
F LES
In the ruined, barbaric world of the near future, a lone woman cares for a deserted child and surveys her city's disintegration, the hordes of safety-seeking people, and her own painful adolescence, childhood, and infancy.
Margaret Mahy
YF z MAH
On the fifth anniversary of his older sister's death, nineteen-year-old Jonny Dart, troubled by feelings of guilt and an imperfect memory of the event, goes in search of the only other witness to the fatal accident and, through a chance meeting with a senile old woman, finds a way to free himself of the past.
John Mulgan
F z MUL
Joyce Carol Oates
YF OAT
When sixteen-year-old Matt is falsely accused of threatening to blow up his high school and his friends turn against him, an unlikely classmate comes to his aid.;"Matt Donaghy is the class joker and Ursula Riggs is the misfit loner. Neither knows the other. But when Matt is arrested on a charge of threatening to blow up the school and massacre the students, Ursula is the only one who sees through the hysteria and hypocrisy, and corroborates Matt's story."
Peter FitzSimons
940.5344 WAK
In the early 1930s, Nancy Wake was a young woman enjoying a bohemian life in Paris. By the end of the Second World War she was the Gestapo's most wanted person. As a naïve journalist, Nancy Wake witnessed a horrific scene of Nazi violence in a Viennese street. From that momement she declared she would do everything in her power to rid Europe of the Nazi presence. What began as a courier job here and there, became a highly successful escape network for Allied soldiers. Her network was soon so successful that she had to flee France to escape the Gestapo who had dubbed her 'the white mouse' for her knack of slipping through its traps.
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