LOIS LOWRY

1. The Giver

This haunting story centers on Jonas, who lives in a seemingly ideal, if colorless, world of
conformity and contentment. Not until he's given his life assignment as the Receiver of Memory
does he begin to understand the dark, complex secrets behind his fragile community.

MARKUS ZUSAK

1. The Book Thief

Set during World War II in Germany, Markus Zusaks groundbreaking new novel is the story of
Liesel Meminger, a foster girl living outside of Munich. Liesel scratches out a meager existence
for herself by stealing when she encounters something she cant resist books. By her brother's
graveside, Liesel's life is changed when she picks up a single object, partially hidden in the snow.
It is The Gravedigger's Handbook, left behind there by accident, and it is her first act of book
thievery. With the help of her accordion-playing foster father, she learns to read and shares her
stolen books with her neighbors during bombing raids as well as with the Jewish man hidden in
her basement before he is marched to Dachau. This is an unforgettable story about the ability of
books to feed the soul.

J.D. SALINGER

1. The Catcher in the Rye

The hero-narrator of The Catcher in the Rye is an ancient child of sixteen, a native New Yorker
named Holden Caulfield. Through circumstances that tend to preclude adult, secondhand
description, he leaves his prep school in Pennsylvania and goes underground in New York City for
three days. The boy himself is at once too simple and too complex for us to make any final
comment about him or his story. Perhaps the safest thing we can say about Holden is that he
was born in the world not just strongly attracted to beauty but, almost, hopelessly impaled on it.
There are many voices in this novel: children's voices, adult voices, underground voices-but
Holden's voice is the most eloquent of all. Transcending his own vernacular, yet remaining
marvelously faithful to it, he issues a perfectly articulated cry of mixed pain and pleasure.
However, like most lovers and clowns and poets of the higher orders, he keeps most of the pain
to, and for, himself. The pleasure he gives away, or sets aside, with all his heart. It is there for the
reader who can handle it to keep.

FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT

1. A Little Princess

Sara Crewe, an exceptionally intelligent and imaginative student at Miss Minchin's Select
Seminary for Young Ladies, is devastated when her adored, indulgent father dies. Now penniless
and banished to a room in the attic, Sara is demeaned, abused, and forced to work as a servant.
How this resourceful girl's fortunes change again is at the center of A Little Princess, one of the
best-loved stories in all of children's literature.

2. The Secret Garden

When orphaned Mary Lennox comes to live at her uncle's great house on the Yorkshire Moors,
she finds it full of secrets. The mansion has nearly one hundred rooms, and her uncle keeps
himself locked up. And at night, she hears the sound of crying down one of the long corridors.

The gardens surrounding the large property are Mary's only escape. Then, Mary discovers a
secret garden, surrounded by walls and locked with a missing key. One day, with the help of two
unexpected companions, she discovers a way in. Is everything in the garden dead, or can Mary
bring it back to life?
HARPER LEE

1. To Kill a Mockingbird

The unforgettable novel of a childhood in a sleepy Southern town and the crisis of conscience
that rocked it, To Kill A Mockingbird became both an instant bestseller and a critical success
when it was first published in 1960. It went on to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1961 and was later
made into an Academy Award-winning film, also a classic.

Compassionate, dramatic, and deeply moving, To Kill A Mockingbird takes readers to the roots of
human behavior - to innocence and experience, kindness and cruelty, love and hatred, humor
and pathos. Now with over 18 million copies in print and translated into ten languages, this
regional story by a young Alabama woman claims universal appeal. Harper Lee always
considered her book to be a simple love story. Today it is regarded as a masterpiece of American
literature.

ANNA SEWELL

1. Black Beauty

A horse is a horse of course unless of course the horse is Black Beauty. Animal-loving children
have been devoted to Black Beauty throughout this century, and no doubt will continue through
the next.
Although Anna Sewell's classic paints a clear picture of turn-of-the-century London, its message
is universal and timeless: animals will serve humans well if they are treated with consideration
and kindness.
Black Beauty tells the story of the horse's own long and varied life, from a well-born colt in a
pleasant meadow to an elegant carriage horse for a gentleman to a painfully overworked cab
horse.
Throughout, Sewell rails - in a gentle, 19th-century way - against animal maltreatment. Young
readers will follow Black Beauty's fortunes, good and bad, with gentle masters as well as cruel.
Children can easily make the leap from horse-human relationships to human-human
relationships, and begin to understand how their own consideration of others may be a benefit
to all.

CHARLOTTE BRONTE

1. Jane Eyre

Orphaned into the household of her Aunt Reed at Gateshead and subject to the cruel regime at
Lowood charity school, Jane Eyre nonetheless emerges unbroken in spirit and integrity. She takes
up the post of governess at Thornfield, falls in love with Mr. Rochester, and discovers the
impediment to their lawful marriage in a story that transcends melodrama to portray a woman's
passionate search for a wider and richer life than Victorian society traditionally allowed.

OSCAR WILDE

1. The Picture of Dorian Gray

Written in his distinctively dazzling manner, Oscar Wildes story of a fashionable young man who
sells his soul for eternal youth and beauty is the authors most popular work. The tale of Dorian
Grays moral disintegration caused a scandal when it first appeared in 1890, but though Wilde
was attacked for the novels corrupting inuence, he responded that there is, in fact, a terrible
moral in Dorian Gray. Just a few years later, the book and the aesthetic/moral dilemma it
presented became issues in the trials occasioned by Wildes homosexual liaisons, which resulted
in his imprisonment. Of Dorian Grays relationship to autobiography, Wilde noted in a letter,
Basil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry what the world thinks me: Dorian what I would
like to bein other ages, perhaps.
FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY

1. Crime and Punishment

Through the story of the brilliant but conicted young Raskolnikov and the murder he commits,
Fyodor Dostoevsky explores the theme of redemption through suffering. Crime and Punishment
put Dostoevsky at the forefront of Russian writers when it appeared in 1866 and is now one of
the most famous and inuential novels in world literature.

The poverty-stricken Raskolnikov, a talented student, devises a theory about extraordinary men
being above the law, since in their brilliance they think new thoughts and so contribute to
society. He then sets out to prove his theory by murdering a vile, cynical old pawnbroker and her
sister. The act brings Raskolnikov into contact with his own buried conscience and with two
characters the deeply religious Sonia, who has endured great suffering, and Porfiry, the
intelligent and discerning official who is charged with investigating the murder both of whom
compel Raskolnikov to feel the split in his nature. Dostoevsky provides readers with a
suspenseful, penetrating psychological analysis that goes beyond the crime which in the
course of the novel demands drastic punishment to reveal something about the human
condition: The more we intellectualize, the more imprisoned we become.

JOHN STEINBECK

1. The Grapes of Wrath

First published in 1939, Steinbecks Pulitzer Prize winning epic of the Great Depression chronicles
the Dust Bowl migration of the 1930s and tells the story of one Oklahoma farm family, the Joads,
driven from their homestead and forced to travel west to the promised land of California. Out of
their trials and their repeated collisions against the hard realities of an America divided into
haves and have-nots evolves a drama that is intensely human yet majestic in its scale and moral
vision, elemental yet plainspoken, tragic but ultimately stirring in its human dignity.

A portrait of the conict between the powerful and the powerless, of one mans fierce reaction
to injustice, and of one womans stoical strength, the novel captures the horrors of the Great
Depression and probes the very nature of equality and justice in America.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

1. Romeo and Juliet

In Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare creates a world of violence and generational conict in which
two young people fall in love and die because of that love. The story is rather extraordinary in
that the normal problems faced by young lovers are here so very large. It is not simply that the
families of Romeo and Juliet disapprove of the lover's affection for each other; rather, the
Montagues and the Capulets are on opposite sides in a blood feud and are trying to kill each
other on the streets of Verona. Every time a member of one of the two families dies in the fight,
his relatives demand the blood of his killer. Because of the feud, if Romeo is discovered with
Juliet by her family, he will be killed. Once Romeo is banished, the only way that Juliet can avoid
being married to someone else is to take a potion that apparently kills her, so that she is buried
with the bodies of her slain relatives. In this violent, death-filled world, the movement of the
story from love at first sight to the union of the lovers in death seems almost inevitable.

2. Hamlet

Hamlet is the story of the Prince of Denmark who learns of the death of his father at the hands
of his uncle, Claudius. Claudius murders Hamlet's father, his own brother, to take the throne of
Denmark and to marry Hamlet's widowed mother. Hamlet is sunk into a state of great despair as
a result of discovering the murder of his father and the infidelity of his mother. Hamlet is torn
between his great sadness and his desire for the revenge of his father's murder.
MARY SHELLEY

1. Frankenstein

Mary Shelley began writing Frankenstein when she was only eighteen. At once a Gothic thriller, a
passionate romance, and a cautionary tale about the dangers of science, Frankenstein tells the
story of committed science student Victor Frankenstein. Obsessed with discovering the cause of
generation and life and bestowing animation upon lifeless matter, Frankenstein assembles a
human being from stolen body parts but; upon bringing it to life, he recoils in horror at the
creature's hideousness. Tormented by isolation and loneliness, the once-innocent creature turns
to evil and unleashes a campaign of murderous revenge against his creator, Frankenstein.

LEO TOLSTOY

1. Anna Karenina

Leo Tolstoys classic story of doomed love is one of the most admired novels in world literature.
Generations of readers have been enthralled by his magnificent heroine, the unhappily married
Anna Karenina, and her tragic affair with dashing Count Vronsky.

In their world frivolous liaisons are commonplace, but Anna and Vronskys consuming passion
makes them a target for scorn and leads to Annas increasing isolation. The heartbreaking
trajectory of their relationship contrasts sharply with the colorful swirl of friends and family
members who surround them, especially the newlyweds Kitty and Levin, who forge a touching
bond as they struggle to make a life together. Anna Karenina is a masterpiece not only because
of the unforgettable woman at its core and the stark drama of her fate, but also because it
explores and illuminates the deepest questions about how to live a fulfilled life.

L.M. MONTGOMERY

1. Anne of Green Gables

Everyone's favorite redhead, the spunky Anne Shirley, begins her adventures at Green Gables, a
farm outside Avonlea, Prince Edward Island. When the freckled girl realizes that the elderly
Cuthberts wanted to adopt a boy instead, she begins to try to win them and, consequently, the
reader, over.

JOSEPH CONRAD

1. Heart of Darkness

Dark allegory describes Marlows journey up the Congo River and his meeting with, and
fascination by, Mr. Kurtz, a mysterious personage who dominates the unruly inhabitants of the
region. Masterly blend of adventure, character development, psychological penetration.
Considered by many Conrads finest, most enigmatic story.

FRANZ KAFKA

1. The Metamorphosis

It is the story of a young man who, transformed overnight into a giant beetle-like insect,
becomes an object of disgrace to his family, an outsider in his own home, a quintessentially
alienated man. A harrowing -- though absurdly comic -- meditation on human feelings of
inadequacy, guilt, and isolation, The Metamorphosis has taken its place as one of the most
widely read and inuential works of twentieth-century fiction. As W.H. Auden wrote, "Kafka is
important to us because his predicament is the predicament of modern man."
ALICE SEBOLD

1. The Lovely Bones

The Lovely Bones is the story of a family devastated by a gruesome murder -- a murder
recounted by the teenage victim. Upsetting, you say? Remarkably, first-time novelist Alice Sebold
takes this difficult material and delivers a compelling and accomplished exploration of a
fractured family's need for peace and closure.

The details of the crime are laid out in the first few pages: from her vantage point in heaven,
Susie Salmon describes how she was confronted by the murderer one December afternoon on
her way home from school. Lured into an underground hiding place, she was raped and killed.
But what the reader knows, her family does not. Anxiously, we keep vigil with Susie, aching for
her grieving family, desperate for the killer to be found and punished.

Sebold creates a heaven that's calm and comforting, a place whose residents can have whatever
they enjoyed when they were alive -- and then some. But Susie isn't ready to release her hold on
life just yet, and she intensely watches her family and friends as they struggle to cope with a
reality in which she is no longer a part. To her great credit, Sebold has shaped one of the most
loving and sympathetic fathers in contemporary literature.

ARTHUR GOLDEN

1. Memoirs of a Geisha

A literary sensation and runaway bestseller, this brilliant debut novel presents with seamless
authenticity and exquisite lyricism the true confessions of one of Japan's most celebrated geisha.

In Memoirs of a Geisha, we enter a world where appearances are paramount; where a girl's
virginity is auctioned to the highest bidder; where women are trained to beguile the most
powerful men; and where love is scorned as illusion. It is a unique and triumphant work of
fiction - at once romantic, erotic, suspenseful - and c ompletely unforgettable.

DANIEL KEYES

1. Flowers for Algernon

With more than five million copies sold, Flowers for Algernon is the beloved, classic story of a
mentally disabled man whose experimental quest for intelligence mirrors that of Algernon, an
extraordinary lab mouse. In poignant diary entries, Charlie tells how a brain operation increases
his IQ and changes his life. As the experimental procedure takes effect, Charlie's intelligence
expands until it surpasses that of the doctors who engineered his metamorphosis. The
experiment seems to be a scientific breakthrough of paramount importance--until Algernon
begins his sudden, unexpected deterioration. Will the same happen to Charlie?

SHEL SILVERSTEIN

1. The Giving Tree

So begins a story of unforgettable perception, beautifully written and illustrated by the gifted
and versatile Shel Silverstein.

Every day the boy would come to the tree to eat her apples, swing from her branches, or slide
down her trunk...and the tree was happy. But as the boy grew older he began to want more from
the tree, and the tree gave and gave and gave.
This is a tender story, touched with sadness, aglow with consolation. Shel Silverstein has created
a moving parable for readers of all ages that offers an affecting interpretation of the gift of giving
and a serene acceptance of another's capacity to love in return.