BOOK LIST Advanced 1
• Townsend, Sue. The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, aged 13 ¾. The funny journal of a teenager who believes he’s an undiscovered intellectual and in love.
• Khaled Hosseini. The Kite Runner The Kite Runner tells the story of Amir, a young boy from the Wazir Akbar Khan district of Kabul, who befriended Hassan, the son of his father's Hazara servant. The story is set against a backdrop of tumultuous events, from the fall of the monarchy in Afghanistan through the Soviet invasion, the mass exodus of refugees to Pakistan and the United States, and the rise of the Taliban regime.
It is also important to understand that there are various interpretations of this book, ranging from the way in which the Taliban treated its "own" people to the relationship between the two boys being a representation of the microcosms of society.
• Haddon, Mark. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time. Mark Haddon's bitterly funny debut novel is a murder mystery told by an autistic version of Adrian Mole, the fifteen-year-old Christopher John Francis Boone, a mathematically gifted and socially hopeless teenager raised in a working-class home.
• Chevalier, Tracy. The Girl with a Pearl Earring. In Tracy Chevalier's Girl with a Pearl Earring, the narrator, Griet, is a quiet Dutch girl from a family that has fallen on hard times. She takes a job as a servant in the household of the famous painter Vermeer, but due to circumstances quite outside her control, she begins to cause turmoil in the family, at the same time that she becomes entranced by her intense but taciturn master.
• Boyne, John. The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is a fictional story that offers a unique perspective on how prejudice, hatred and violence affect innocent people, particularly children, during wartime. Through the lens of an eight-year-old boy, we witness a forbidden friendship that forms between Bruno, the son of Nazi commandant, and Schmuel, a Jewish boy held captive in a concentration camp during the reality of World War II.
