|
|||||||
 Klett € 7,90 |
Ann Jaramillo, La Linea When Miguel, 15, leaves San Jacinto, Mexico, to join his parents in California, his sister, Elena, 13, secretly follows him. Together with their guides they barely survive a harrowing journey through the desert and across la linea, the border. A gripping contemporary survival adventure, this spare first novel is also a heart-wrenching family story of courage, betrayal, and love. The harsh facts of the border crossing are immediate--the horrors of dehydration, the soldiers' violence, corruption, and the migrants' terrifying, often disastrous attempts to hop the trains. Miguel's first-person narrative tells it without romanticism. The young people are brave, but they are angry at each other and at their parents, who left them seven years before. They do make it, but always there is the reality of those who do not. |
||||||
|
|
T.C. Boyle, The
Tortilla Curtain When Delaney Mossbacher knocks down a Mexican pedestrian, he neither reports the accident nor takes his victim to hospital. Instead the man accepts $20 and limps back to poverty and his pregnant 17-year-old wife, leaving Delaney to return to his privileged life in California. But these two men are fated against each other, as Delaney attempts to clear the land of the illegal immigrants who he thinks are turning his state park into a ghetto, and a boiling pot of racism and prejudice threatens to spill over. |
||||||
|
|
Paul Auster, Moon
Palace A contemporary novel which tells the story
of Marco Stanley Fogg - orphan, child of the 1960s - spanning three
generations. The narrative moves from the early years of this century to
the first lunar landings, from Manhattan to the landscape of the American
West.
|
||||||
|
|
Robert Cormier On the outskirts of a small American town, a bus-load of young children is being held hostage. The hijackers are a cold and ruthless group, opposed to the secret government agency Inner Delta. At the centre of the battle are three teenagers. Miro is the terrorist with no past and no emotions. Kate is the bus driver, caught up in the nightmare, and Ben is the General's son who must act as a go-between. This is a tense drama, with death being the only escape. |
||||||
|
|
Rhodri Jones, Hillsden Riots
Divine "Hillsden Riots" by Rhodri Jones focuses on black violence and white prejudices and puts two extremely different brothers into the centre of the story. It contains a very subjective point of view of the circumstances in which blacks live in Britain.
|
||||||
|
|
Margaret Atwood,
The Handmaid's Tale Atwood presents a fable of the near future. In the Republic of Gilead, formerly the United States, far-right Schlafly/Falwell-type ideals have been carried to extremes in the monotheocratic government. The resulting society is a feminist's nightmare: women are strictly controlled, unable to have jobs or money and assigned to various classes: the chaste, childless Wives; the housekeeping Marthas; and the reproductive Handmaids, who turn their offspring over to the "morally fit" Wives. The tale is told by Offred (read: "of Fred"), a Handmaid who recalls the past and tells how the chilling society came to be.
|
||||||
|
|
Barry Unsworth, Morality
Play Locating his "play" in fourteenth-century England, Unsworth dramatically portrays murder and deceit in this engaging new novel. Nicholas Barber, a 23-year-old monk, having broken his chastity vows, flees the wrath of his bishop and fellow monks. On the road, he accidentally witnesses the death of a traveling player and his subsequent mourning by fellow troupe members. Barber is discovered spying but is eventually initiated into the troupe, becoming a player himself. The troupe performs its standard morality play in a small town that winter before hearing of a young boy's murder and a deaf-mute girl's imprisonment for the crime. Attempting to portray the story as a drama for the town's entertainment, the players uncover the true story and find themselves in the middle of a corrupt power-play, and a morally twisted cover-up.
|
||||||
|
|
N.H. Kleinbaum,
Dead Poets Society Todd Anderson and his friends at Welton Academy can hardly believe how their lives have changed since their new English professor, the flamboyant John Keating, has challenged them: "Make your lives extraordinary!" Inspired by Keating, the boys resurrect the Dead Poets Society - a secret club where, free from the constraints and expectations of school, parents and the world, they let their passions run wild. As Keating turns the boys on to the power of words, they begin to discover not only the beauty of language, but, also the importance of making each moment count. Until the fragile universe he has built for them begins, gradually, to implode... |
||||||
|
|
|||||||
