Something to Answer For

Townrow an ex-sergeant, now a corrupted fund distributor heading to Cairo to interrogate about his friend Elie
Khoury, on the request of his widow wife mrs Khoury. There he sent to jail for joking about his marriage with Mrs
Khoury and released once his train departed. Townrow returns to Port Said and visits Christous’s bar. Christous
informs him that after a great difficulty mrs Khoury able to receive his husband’s dead body back to Lebanon and
buried him. Because of this Colonel Nasar took the Suez Canal as Egypt’s. Townrow is not sure whether to believe
any of this and gets so drunk he blacks out. He awakens naked and alone, and is attacked by a passing camel-
driver, causing his head and one eye to be bandaged for most of the remainder of the novel. After the discussion
with Christous and Townrow’s subsequent blackout, the novel becomes much more dream-like and at times
surreal, with Townrow a very unreliable narrator who cannot remember his nationality. He imagines that Elie is still
alive. He meets an Egyptian Jew, Leah, who is married and repels his attentions though apparently she later
becomes his lover and develops an obsession for him. Townrow walks though scenes of mob unrest, is arrested as
a spy, and watches bloody gunfights between Egyptian and British troops with bemused detachment. He imagines
digging up Elie’s grave to make certain he is really dead, then apparently actually does so. At the end of the novel,
Townrow comes to believe that a citizen is not responsible for the morality of his government and has only himself
and his own actions to answer for.

The Elected Member

Norman is the clever one of a close-knit Jewish family in the East End of London. Infant prodigy; brilliant barrister;
the apple of his parents' eyes... until at forty-one he becomes a drug addict, confined to his bedroom, at the mercy
of his hallucinations and paranoia.
For Norman, his committal to a mental hospital represents the ultimate act of betrayal. For Rbbi Zweck, Norman's
father, his son's deterioration is a bitter reminder of his own guilt and failure. Only Bella, the unmarried sister, still
in her childhood white ankle socks, can reach across the abyss of pain to bring father and son the elusive peace
which they both desperately crave.

Trouble
The novel concerns the arrival of Englishman Major Brendan Archer, recently discharged from the British Army, at
the Majestic Hotel on the Wexford coast in south-east Ireland in 1919. Both the hotel, and the town in which it is
situated, Kilnalough, are fictional. Archer is convinced he is engaged, though sure he had never actually proposed, to
Angela Spencer, the daughter of Edward Spencer, the elderly owner of the hotel. She has written to him since they
met in 1916 while on leave from the trench warfare of the Western Front.
The Spencers are an Anglo-Irish Protestant family, strongly Unionist in their attitudes towards Ireland's ties to the
United Kingdom. Archer functions as a confused observer of the dysfunctional Spencer family, representing the
Anglo-Irish, and the local Catholic population. As the novel progresses, social and economic relationships break
down, mirrored by the gentle decay of the hotel.

In a Free State
It’s not a novel, it’s actually a short story that contains 3 tales. It’s the only one which win a Booker though it’s not a
Novel.
First Tale: The first tale concerns an Indian servant from Bombay who, having no real alternative at home,
accompanies his master on a diplomatic mission to Washington, D.C. The two Indians initially must cope with the
poor exchange rate of Indian currency in the United States.
The servant lives in what is virtually a cupboard, and inadvertently blows several weeks' salary just buying a snack.
He then meets a restaurant proprietor who offers him an apparent fortune as a salary, so he absconds and works at
the restaurant. Once he has his affairs in reasonable order, however, he starts to live in fear that his master will find
him and order him back. He also learns that he is working illegally and is liable to deportation.
The only way of resolving the situation is to marry a woman who had seduced him, but whom he had avoided ever
since out of shame.
Second Tale: The second story features an extended South Asian family in the rural West Indies, in which one
wealthy cousin manages to humiliate another, the narrator. The richer family has a son who goes to Canada and is
destined to do well, while the other cousins can expect nothing.
The younger brother of the second family then sets out for England to study engineering, while his elder brother does all
he can to support him. Eventually the elder brother follows him to England with the aim of helping him further. He works
long hours in demeaning jobs to support his brother's studies, but eventually makes enough money to set up his own
business in a restaurant. He subsequently discovers that his brother, despite appearances, is doing no studying at all; his
restaurant, meanwhile, becomes frequented by hooligans. In a fit of rage, the narrator ends up murdering one of them,
who turns out to be a friend of his brother. The story ends when he attends his brother's wedding, with a prison guard for
company.
Third Tale: The story is set in an African Great Lakes state that has recently acquired independence. Incidents of
violence become more frequent in the cities, while there are signs of further violence in the countryside. Bobby is an
official (and Homosexual) who has been attending a conference in the capital city. He now heads back to the
governmental compound where he lives; he has offered a lift to Linda, another colleague's wife. The relationship
between the two is complex from the outset; it seems Bobby is intent on aggravating the initially calm Linda. His
previous history of mental illness is explored. Things go from bad to worse when they put up at a hotel, run by an
old colonel who refuses to adapt to the new conditions of independence. There, they have dinner, and they witness
a scene between the colonel and Peter, his servant, whom he accuses of planning his murder. Meanwhile, Bobby
discovers that Linda was planning some extra-marital activity with a friend along the way; he becomes furious and
hostile. The two reach their destination, but not before visiting the site where the nation's old king was recently
murdered; encountering a philosophical Hindu who is planning to move to Egypt; and observing the beginnings of a
genocidal wave of violence. Bobby is beaten by the army at a checkpoint.

G.
In this luminous novel John Berger relates the story of "G.," a young man forging an energetic sexual career in Europe
during the early years of this century. With profound compassion, Berger explores the hearts and minds of both men and
women, and what happens during sex, to reveal the conditions of the Don Juan's success: his essential loneliness, the
quiet cumulation in each of his sexual experiences of all of those that precede it, the tenderness that infuses even the
briefest of his encounters, and the way women experience their own extraordinariness through their moments with him.
All of this Berger sets against the turbulent backdrop of Garibaldi and the failed revolution of Milanese workers in 1898,
the Boer War, and the first flight across the Alps, making G. a brilliant novel about the search for intimacy in history's
private moments.
The novel is actually, set in pre-First World War Europe, and its protagonist, named ‘G’, is a Don Juan or Casanova-like
lover of women who gradually comes to political consciousness after misadventures across the continent.

The Siege of Krishnapur

The Siege of Krishnapur is part of Farrell's "Empire Trilogy", which concerns the British Empire and its decline in three
locations. Other books in the series are Troubles, which is set during the Irish War for Independence (1919–1921), and
The Singapore Grip, which takes place just before the invasion of Singapore by the Japanese in World War II, during the
last days of the British Empire.
The story is set in the town of Krishnapur and tells of a besieged British garrison which holds out for four months against
an army of native sepoys. Among the community are the Collector, who is an extremely Victorian believer in progress and
father of small children and who can often be found daydreaming of the Great Exhibition; the Magistrate a Chartist in his
youth but who sees his youthful political ideals destroyed by witnessing the siege; Dr Dunstaple and Dr McNab who row
over the best way to treat cholera; Fleury, a poetical young man from England who learns to become a soldier and Lucy a
"fallen" woman rescued from a bungalow who eventually runs a tea salon in the despairing community. By the end of the
novel cholera, starvation and the sepoys have killed off most of the inhabitants, who are reduced to eating dogs, horses
and finally beetles, their teeth much loosened by scurvy. "The final retreat of the British, still doggedly stiff-upper-lipped
through the pantries, laundries, music rooms and ballroom of the residency, using chandeliers and violins as weapons, is a
comic delight".
 The Conservationist
In South Africa under apartheid, Mehring is a rich white businessman who is not satisfied with his life. His ex-wife has
gone to America, his liberal son, Terry (who is probably gay) criticizes his conservative/capitalist ways, and his lovers and
colleagues do not actually seem interested in him. On a whim he buys a 400-acre farm outside the city, afterwards trying
to explain this purchase to himself as the search for a higher meaning in life. But it is clear that he knows next to nothing
about farming, and that black workers run it – Mehring is simply an outsider, an intruder on the daily life of "his" farm. His
objective in buying the farm is to make a tax deductible expense. "No farm is beautiful unless it's productive," says
Mehring. Plus it is proper for his amorous escapades. Land was a thing of his race. He once visits his farm with his
girlfriend, Antonia.
One day the black foreman, Jacobus, finds an unidentified dead body on the farm. Since the dead man is black, the police
find no urgency to look into the case and simply bury the body on the spot where it was found. The idea of an unknown
black man buried on his land begins to "haunt" Mehring. A flood brings the body back to the surface; although the farm
workers do not know the stranger, they now give him a proper burial as if he were a family member. There are hints that
Mehring's own burial will be less emotional than this burial of a stranger.

Holiday
Edwin Fisher is on a week long holiday in the sea-side town of Bealthorpe. At the age of thirty two he is estranged
from his wife and does not have any children. Hence he is alone on his holiday. Bealthorpe has been a frequent
holiday destination for his parents also. He remembers coming to the town as a child. On this particular holiday, his
solitude gives him the chance to look back on his failed marriage and on his relationship with his father.
Interestingly, Fisher’s parents-in-laws are also holidaying in the same town. When Fisher meets his father-in-law,
David Vernon, by chance at the local pub, a line of tension is introduced in the novel. Vernon wants Fisher’s
marriage to work and will go to great lengths to convince both daughter and son-in-law.
Along with this main story line, some married pairs are presented by Middleton as minor characters in the novel.
Their marital relationships offer a point of comparison and contrast to Fisher’s own marriage. Some characters also
give a contrast to Fisher’s relationship with his father.
The holiday gains significance when Fisher grows emotionally at the end of the seven day period.

Heat and Dust

The initial stages of the novel are told in the first person, from the narrative voice of a woman who travels to India,
to find out more about her step-grandmother, Olivia. She has various letters written by Olivia, and through reading
these, and learning from her own experiences in India. Set in colonial India during the 1920s, Heat and Dust tells the
story of Olivia, a beautiful woman suffocated by the propriety and social constraints of her position as the wife of an
important English civil servant. Longing for passion and independence, Olivia is drawn into the spell of the Nawab, a
minor Indian prince deeply involved in gang raids and criminal plots. She is intrigued by the Nawab's charm and
aggressive courtship, and soon begins to spend most of her days in his company. But then she becomes pregnant,
and unsure of the child's paternity, she is faced with a wrenching dilemma. Her reaction to the crisis humiliates her
husband and outrages the British community, breeding a scandal that lives in collective memory long after her
death.

Saville
Saville centres on Colin, a young boy growing up in the fictional Yorkshire mining village of Saxton during the Second
World War and the post-war years.
This is the story of a miner's son, and his growth from the 1930s on, his rise in the world by way of grammar school
and college. At first there is triumph in this, not least for the father who had spurred him on, but later "alienated
from his class, and with nowhere yet to go" Colin finds himself struggling to remain in the place that made him.

Staying On
After the independence, a British couple Tusker and Lily Smalley decided to stay on in India. Given the chance to return
'home' when Tusker, once a Colonel in the British Army, retired, they chose instead to remain in the small hill town of
Pangkot, with its eccentric inhabitants and archaic rituals left over from the days of the Empire. Only the tyranny of their
landlady, the imposing Mrs Bhoolabhoy, threatens to upset the quiet rhythm of their days.
Both funny and deeply moving, Staying On is a unique, engrossing portrait of the end of an empire and of a forty-year
love affair.
"Staying On" was an expression used by British expatriates in India during the latter stages of the Raj. It related to the
minority of British officials, military officers and commercial traders who chose to remain in India after spending their
working lives there. The more common practice was to retire on pension to Britain.

The Sea, The Sea

Charles Arrowby, leading light of England's theatrical set, retires from glittering London to an isolated home by the sea.
He plans to write a memoir about his great love affair with Clement Makin, his mentor both professionally and personally,
and to amuse himself with Lizzie, an actress he has strung along for many years. None of his plans work out, and his
memoir evolves into a riveting chronicle of the strange events and unexpected visitors--some real, some spectral--that
disrupt his world and shake his oversized ego to its very core.
In exposing the jumble of motivations that drive Arrowby and the other characters, Iris Murdoch lays bare "the truth of
untruth"--the human vanity, jealousy, and lack of compassion behind the disguises they present to the world. Played out
against a vividly rendered landscape and filled with allusions to myth and magic, Charles's confrontation with the tidal rips
of love and forgiveness is one of Murdoch's most moving and powerful novels.
**Irish Murdoch’s Biographer Peter J. Conradi, says that the title is actually quoted from Greek warrior and writer
Xenophon’s, Anabasis. He further states that the title may also a reference from Paul Valery’s Poem Le Cimetiere Marin.

Offshore
On the Battersea Reach of the Thames, a mixed bag of the slightly disreputable, the temporarily lost, and the patently
eccentric live on houseboats, rising and falling with the great river’s tides. Belonging to neither land nor sea, they cling to
one another in a motley yet kindly society. There is Maurice, by occupation a male prostitute, by happenstance a receiver
of stolen goods. And Richard, a buttoned-up ex-navy man whose boat dominates the Reach. Then there is Nenna, a
faithful but abandoned wife, the diffident mother of two young girls running wild on the waterfront streets.
It is Nenna’s domestic predicament that, as it deepens, draws the relations among this scrubby community together into
ever more complex and comic patterns.
The book was inspired by the most difficult years of Fitzgerald's own life, years that that she had spent living on an old
Thames sailing barge named Grace on Battersea Reach. She later regretted that some translations of the novel's title
suggested "far from the shore" when she was in fact writing about boats that were anchored just a few yards from the
bank, and the "emotional restlessness of my characters, halfway between the need for security and the doubtful
attraction of danger".

Rites of Passage

**To the Ends of the Earth is the name given to a trilogy of nautical, relational novels—Rites of Passage (1980), Close
Quarters (1987), and Fire down below (1989). Set on a former British man-of-war transporting migrants to Australia in the
early 19th century, the novels explore themes of class (assumed status) and man's reversion to savagery when isolated, in
this case, the closed society of the ship's passengers and crew.
Sailing to Australia in the early years of the nineteenth century, Edmund Talbot keeps a journal to amuse his godfather
back in England. Full of wit and disdain, he records the mounting tensions on the ancient warship, where officers, sailors,
soldiers and emigrants jostle in the crammed spaces below decks.
Then a single passenger, the obsequious Reverend Colley, attracts the animosity of the sailors, and in the seclusion of the
fo’castle something happens to bring him into a ‘hell of self-degradation’, where shame is a force deadlier than the sea
itself.

Midnight’s Children
The story is essentially the auto-bioghraphy of Saleem Sinai, a man with huge nose, who was born at midnight, the
midnight of India's independence, and found himself mysteriously "handcuffed to history" by the coincidence. He is one
of 1,001 children born at the midnight hour, each of them endowed with an extraordinary talent—and whose privilege
and curse it is to be both master and victims of their times. His whole family dies during the first Indo-Pak war. After that
he lives in the slums with magicians and takes up making Pickles at a pickle factory. Through Saleem's gifts—inner ear and
wildly sensitive sense of smell—we are drawn into a fascinating family saga set against the vast, colourful background of
the India of the 20th century.
Midnight's Children has been called "a watershed in the post-independence development of the Indian English novel", to
the extent that the decade after its 1981 publication has been called "post-Rushdie". Rushdie's innovative use of magic
realism allowed him to employ the nation-as-family allegory and at the same time confound it with an impossible
telepathy among a multitude of children from a multitude of languages, cultures, regions and religions. No one genre
dominates the entire novel, however. It encompasses the comic and the tragic, the real, the surreal, and the mythic. The
postcolonial experience could not be expressed by a Western or Eastern, public or private, polarity or unity, any more
than any single political party could represent all the people of the nation.

Schindler’s Ark
c Oskar Schindler was a German industrialist and a member of the Nazi Party who is credited with saving the lives of
1,200 Jews during the Holocaust by employing them in his enamelware and ammunitions factories in occupied Poland
and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.
Widely known by the American title it shares with the subsequent film adaptation by Steven Spielberg, Schindler’s List
was originally published in Australia in 1982 under the title Schindler’s Ark. Thomas Keneally’s work of historical fiction is
the story of Nazi Party member Oskar Schindler, who becomes an heroic figure by saving some twelve hundred Jews from
German and Polish concentration camps. Schindler realizes the totality of the Nazis’ planned actions toward the Jews.
Schindler makes a deal to take eleven hundred Jews from Paszow to use as laborers at his factory. There they receive
better treatment and those who are taken from the camp to Schindler’s factory, Emalia, become known as Schindler’s
Jews. When it becomes evident in 1944 that the Germans are beginning to lose the war, all of the Jews who were
killed at Paszow are exhumed and their bodies incinerated. Schindler decides to move his workers to a safer place.
For the duration of the war, Schindler continues to bribe those in charge to keep “Schindler’s Jews” alive. When the
war ends he encourages the German guards from his factory to return to their families with no further aggression
and gives whatever supplies remain to his workers.
Firmly historically based on actual people and places, Keneally’s novel realistically contrives dialogue and events to form a
cohesive narrative that fills in the details that are not known. Keneally was inspired to write the book by a Holocaust
survivor named Poldek Pfefferberg. In addition to interviewing Pfefferberg, Keneally did extensive research, including
meeting with many people who knew Schindler personally.

Life & Times of Michael K

Life and Times of Michael K is a novel by the South African writer J. M. Coetzee, first published in 1983. The novel is
divided into 3 parts, telling the story of the eponymous Michael K, it details his difficult childhood and his dangerous
journey from Cape Town to the rural village where his mother was born during a fictional civil war that broke out during
the apartheid era. Exploring themes such as the value of life, the complex relationships between mothers and sons, the
passage of time, the effects of war, and the role of race in South African society, Life and Times of Michael K has been
compared to Franz Kafka’s The Trial, due to similarities between the protagonists and the arduous, frustrating nature of
their journeys. Critically acclaimed, it is considered one of the best South African novels of the apartheid era.
Michael, a poor man with cleft lip, who worked as a gardener and in Cape Town, felt worried about his mother’s sickness
(maid), decided to go at his mother’s birth place, Prince Albert. His mother dies on the way and he decides to carry his
mother’s ashes to that place. As he had no required travel papers with him, he being assigned to railway track. After the
job is done, he ultimately reaches at the farm of Prince Albert, which is now isolated and desolate, presently owned by a
relative of K, who treats with k as a servant. K escaped from there and later caught by police and sent to the work camp of
P.A again. Eventually the camp was exploited and K escape again during a Police attack. After hiding few days in to the
mountains picked up by soldiers and sent to a rehabilitation camp. However K escapes from there too. This time he
returns to his home at Cape Town. The same place which he wants to escape at the beginning of the novel.

Hotel Du Lac
The novel tells the story of Edith Hope, a romance writer (uses Pseudonym in her writing) who has been banished from
London in social disgrace. When her life begins to resemble the plots of her own novels, however, Edith flees to
Switzerland, where the quiet luxury of the Hotel du Lac promises to restore her to her senses. But instead of peace and
rest, Edith finds herself sequestered at the hotel with an assortment of love's casualties and exiles. She also attracts the
attention of a worldly man determined to release her unused capacity for mischief and pleasure. As she passes an
enforced vacation in a Swiss hotel. She forms an uneasy friendship with the glamorous Mrs. Pusey and her daughter
Jennifer, and later receives a marriage proposal from Mr. Neville, a wealthy businessman.
Throughout the novel, Edith writes letters addressed to her lover, David, describing her companions. When about to
accept Neville's proposal, she writes a final letter of farewell, noting that is the last she will write, and the first she will
actually send. But after seeing Neville emerge from the Puseys' room in his dressing gown, she tears it up and sends a
telegram to David consisting of one word: "Returning".

The Bone People

The novel is an unusual love story. Filled with violence, fear and twisted romance but still it’s a love story. The story is
based upon 3 people struggling to figure out love and to find it out. Its themes include the abuse of power, solitude and
isolation, spirituality, the need to protect the powerless, coping with grief, silent communication, and redemption. The
Bone People blends the genres of romance and mystery. It was praised for its unique dialogue that blends lyrical and
ribald language, as well as its shifting points of views (from the first person to omniscient) that encompasses characters
both young and old. Its title comes from the prominence given to bones and ancestors in Maori culture. .
In a tower on the New Zealand sea lives Kerewin Holmes, part Maori, part European, an artist estranged from her art, a
woman in exile from her family. One night her solitude is disrupted by a visitor—a speechless, mercurial boy named
Simon P. Gillayley (Nickname Haimona, an European mute boy), who tries to steal from her and then repays her with his
most precious possession. As Kerewin succumbs to Simon's feral charm, she also falls under the spell of his Maori foster
father Joe Gillayley (A Maori man, Simon’s adoptive father), who rescued the boy from a shipwreck and now treats him
with an unsettling mixture of tenderness and brutality. Out of this unorthodox trinity Keri Hulme has created what is at
once a mystery, a love story, and an ambitious exploration of the zone where Maori and European New Zealand meet,
clash, and sometimes merge. The Bone People ends with the three characters living together in happiness (Patchwork
family), despite their respective histories of violence and isolation.

The Old Devils

The novel tells the story of Alun Weaver, who decided to retire from hi successful T.V carrier in London as a “Professional
Welshman” and 3rd rate poet. After 30 years of span now he returns to his college time friend circle with his beautiful
wife, Rhiannon, in South Wales. The group is named as Old Devils- a group of Welsh married couples all in their sixties and
seventies—include Malcolm Cellan-Davies, an unsung local writer, and his wife, Gwen; Peter Thomas, a chemical
engineer, and his wife, Muriel; Charlie Norris, the proprietor of a restaurant, and his wife, Sophie; Percy and Dorothy
Morgan; and Garth Pumphrey, a former veterinarian who with his wife, Angharad now attends to business at a local pub.
They are old now, retired from their professions, and do little else but drink heavily.
However their arrival is both welcome and unwelcome. Its welcome aspect is that the Weavers will bring a breath of life
to what has become a stagnating environment. Alun Weaver is good company, an engaging talker to his men friends, still
an attractive figure to their wives, and, moreover, a man with the glamour of celebrity. His wife, Rhiannon, was clearly a
great beauty in youth, still regretted by Peter Thomas (with whom she once had an unlucky affair ending in abortion), still
admired more platonically by Malcolm. Their arrival is accordingly looked forward to with excitement by almost all.
On the other hand, the Weavers also pose a series of threats. They threaten several marriages, through Peter’s continuing
infatuation with Rhiannon, Sophie Norris’ readiness to restart an affair with Alun, and Gwen Cellan-Davies’ anger over
having been jilted or rejected. Alun’s behaviour also endangers the cohesion of the entire group of friends.
Ironically, the one event in the novel which does precipitate change is not Alun’s arrival but his wholly unexpected death
from a heart attack shortly after being expelled, with his friends, from their favourite pub. Though Alun’s death itself is
“just one of those things,” however, it sets up a reshuffle and, perhaps, a new happiness. Muriel decides to return home
to Yorkshire. Her husband Peter refuses to go with her and moves in instead with the now-widowed Rhiannon. The new
union between the families is oddly cemented by the marriage of Rhiannon’s daughter to Peter’s son. There is a feeling
overall that even in Peter and Rhiannon’s old age, a new beginning can be and has been made.

Moon Tiger
The story opens with a third-person paragraph; an unnamed person says, “I’m writing a history of the world.” A nurse
responds with a few patronizing words before returning to her duties. The narrative switches to a first-person account
from Claudia Hampton, who emphasizes that she is, in fact, going to create a history of the world, and in the process
provide a personal history as well. Claudia offers her backstory in pieces throughout the novel: She is seventy-six years
old, she is dying of cancer and she is a writer and historian.
Claudia Hampton, a 76-year-old English woman and a professional historian, is terminally ill and is spending her last
remaining moments in and out of consciousness thinking of writing a history of the world with her life as a blueprint. Her
first, primordial recollections are of a father that died in World War I, and of the summer of 1920, when she was 10 and
competing with her 11-year-old brother Gordon for fossils.
Claudia and Gordon are, at times throughout their lives, rivals, lovers, and best friends to each other. When the two are in
their late teens they begin an incestuous relationship and find it hard to relate to almost any other person their own age.
Soon, however, their college careers and other events allow both to open up to the outside world, and look outward for
companionship. At the outset of WW-II Gordon sent to India as a, would be economist whereas Caludia went to Cairo for
her corresponding history studies. There she meets with Tom Southern, captain of British tank division, and fall in love
with him. After few weeks Tom is called to defend Egypt at the battle of First Alamein, where he died. After his death
Claudia finds that she s pregnant and miscarries the child.
After the war Claudia and Gordon reunites again. Gordon married with a girl named Sylvia and Claudia met Jesper. Both
Claudia and Gordon discourage one’s another choice. In 1948 Claudia once again find herself pregnant, though she had
not any intentions to marry Jesper, but she decides to have the child, Lisa. Lisa grown up sullen and indifferent to Claudia
and marries at her young age.
Claudia thinks about how her own body is a historical record of her life, how all her injuries and surgeries are recorded
there. She thinks about the Cold War and how her status as a mother inspired greater fear and terror in her despite her
inability to express normal maternal love. She thinks back to a moment just two days before Gordon died, a few years
before. Although their relationship was never the same after the war, his death left a huge gap in her life.
A few years later, when she is diagnosed with cancer, and knowing her own death is imminent, she apologizes to Lisa for
having been a cold and distant mother. Long after the War, Tom's sister Jennifer reads an article Claudia wrote about her
experiences in Egypt, realizes she is the "C." Tom had often referred to in letters home, and mails Claudia his wartime
diary. Soon before she dies, Claudia asks Laszlo to fetch Tom's diary for her. Reading over the short entries in Tom's diary,
many of which refer to his love for her, Claudia allows herself to reflect on her grief for Tom, her sorrow at having been
left behind, and the course her life might have taken had he survived. She comes to peace with the fact that she too will
soon become a set of imperfect memories of those who knew her. The next day, Claudia dies.

Oscar and Lucinda

Oscar And Lucinda is a satirical novel by Australian author Peter Carey. The novel tells the story of the meeting of
Englishman Oscar Hopkins and Australian heiress Lucinda Leplastrier when they are both aboard a ship headed to
Australia. As they get to know each other, they realize that they are both heavy gamblers. Lucinda challenges Oscar to a
bet, knowing that he won’t be able to refuse, and this marks the beginning of their relationship.
On the ship to Australia, Oscar meets Lucinda, a wealthy heiress who had been in London researching the manufacturing
process of glass, as she has spontaneously decided to purchase a glassworks with some of her inheritance and is trying to
figure out how to run the business. Much of the difficulty comes with the fact that she is a woman, and her primarily male
staff does not respect her or allow her to enter into the factory.
As Oscar and Lucinda get to talking aboard the ship, they discover their mutual love for gambling, as Lucinda was often
present at the same late-night card games as Oscar. As Oscar stays with Lucinda, their friendship develops, as both are in
desperate need of a friend. However, even as their feelings for one another grow stronger, it seems impossible for either
of them to communicate these feelings to the other. Oscar helps Lucinda with her building project and through the work
they grow increasingly closer. Their relationship eventually moves beyond friendship, however it is made clear that their
relationship is considered a scandal and is not widely accepted by Sydney society.
Lucinda and challenges Oscar to be able to deliver the glass church to Reverend Hassett in Boat Harbor. She is certain that
Oscar will have no problem completing the task she has laid out for him. However, his mission is derailed when the leader
of the expedition decides to realize his dream of becoming a famous explorer, detouring from the original route. When he
finally makes it to Boat Harbor, Oscar is very ill and so is easily enticed into marrying a local woman. Soon after, Oscar
drowns, and his new wife claims Lucinda’s fortune.

The Remains of the Day

The Remains of the Day is a literary historical novel by Kazuo Ishiguro. The Remains of the Day takes place in England
during the summer of 1956. The protagonist is a man called Stevens. Stevens is a butler at the prestigious Darlington Hall,
where he’s worked for nearly 40 years. He is a serious but gentle man with impeccable manners. He doesn’t socialize
often, and he doesn’t have any romantic interests.
The novel begins in 1956, with Stevens receiving a letter from a former colleague, the housekeeper Miss Kenton (now Mrs
Benn), describing her married life, which Stevens believes hints at an unhappy marriage. Stevens starts to consider paying
Miss Kenton a visit. During his journey by the sports car of his new employer Mr. Farraday, Stevens reflects on his
unshakable loyalty to Lord Darlington. As the book progresses, evidence mounts of Miss Kenton's and Stevens' past
mutual attraction and affection. While they worked together during the years leading up to the Second World War,
Stevens and Miss Kenton failed to admit their true feelings toward one other. Their conversations as recollected by
Stevens show a professional friendship which at times came close to blossoming into romance, but this was evidently a
line that neither dared cross. Stevens in particular never yielded, even when Miss Kenton tried to draw closer to him.
When they finally meet again, Mrs. Benn, having been married now for more than twenty years. She explains that,
although she enjoyed working at Darlington Hall, she’s a happily married woman. She can’t work as a housekeeper again.
She tells him that Lord Darlington didn’t deserve Stevens’s unwavering loyalty. Now, Stevens agrees with her. He decides
to focus on Mr. Farraday and enjoying the rest of his life.

Possession a Romance
Possession is a historical fiction novel by A.S. Byatt. The novel contains two parallel timelines. The first follows modern-
day academics Roland Michell and Maud Bailey as they research the correspondence between Victorian poets Randolph
Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte, whose story makes up the second narrative in the book. The story begins as Roland
reads a book that once belonged to Randolph. Pressed in the pages, he discovers a romantic letter to Christabel. He seeks
out Maud, who is an expert on Christabel and oversees the collection of her unpublished papers in the library. A. S. Byatt,
in part, wrote Possession in response to John Fowles' novel The French Lieutenant's Woman.
Rolanld Mitchell researching about a Victorian poet named, Randolph Henry Ash. His investigation leads him to the poet’s
secret lover Christabel LaMotte, a contemporary poet of Ash and to Dr. Maud Bailey, an established LaMotte scholar and
a distant relative of LaMotte. The two scholar team up to unfold the mystery between Ash and LaMotte. When they try to
reveal the love life of Ash and LaMotte, Mitchell and Bailey too grow a love affair between them. Now the story of these
two couple are became parallel.
Soon the revelation of Ash and LaMotte’s love affairs headlines and the later couple turned into competitor, in the
competition that who will be the first one in concluding the mystery. However it is revealed that instead of being married
and devoted to his Wife, Ash’s marriage was never consummated and he had a passionate affair with LaMotte. They also
have an illegitimate child daughter, whom LaMotte raised as her own and Ash never informed about their child.
The curiosity brings Bailey to the grave of Ash, where she hopes some final letters that buried with hi after his death.
There she reveals that the illegitimate child is none other than herself. As the mystery concluded, Mitchell earns an
academic carrier opens before him and Maud sees a possible future with Mitchell.

The Famished Road

Set in an unnamed African village, Nigerian author Ben Okri’s novel The Famished Road tells the story of Azaro who is a
spirit child or abiku, a term used to describe a child who is destined to die before reaching puberty. The Famished Road is
a hallucinatory story with striking imagery of both the spirit world and the real world.
Azaro, lives in a ghetto of an unknown city in Africa, is constantly harassed by his sibling spirits from another world who
want him to leave this mortal life and return to the world of spirits, sending many emissaries to bring him back. Azaro has
stubbornly refused to leave this life owing to his love for his mother and father.
Azaro continues to be plagued by malevolent spirits, including a three-headed ghost who is angered by Azaro’s refusal to
follow him into the spirit world. One day, the spirits trick Azaro into smashing a blind man’s window. In retribution,
Azaro’s father savagely beats his son. Fed up with his father, Azaro allows himself to be drawn into the spirit world by the
three-headed spirit. Azaro’s father begins to channel his violence into boxing and Azaro takes the name ‘Black Tyger’. He
defeated Green Leopard and resolves to run a political office.
Madame Koto, the owner of a local bar, asks Azaro to visit her establishment, convinced that he will bring good luck and
customers to her bar. The Black Tyger did one more fight at Madame Koto’s, this time against a man in a white suit. After
enduring blow after vicious blow, the Black Tyger pulls off his opponent’s suit, revealing a grotesque, terrifying spirit. As
the crowd recoils in horror, the Black Tyger knocks out the spirit and returns home, badly beaten. He sleeps for three
days, battling other spirits in his head. When the Black Tyger wakes up, having defeated the forces of evil, Azaro is finally
at peace, no longer tormented by spirits himself.
 The English Patient
The novel historical backdrop is the North African/Italian Campaigns of World War II. The story traces the intersection of
four damaged lives in an Italian villa at the end of World War II. Hana, the exhausted nurse; the maimed thief, Caravaggio;
the wary sapper, Kip: each is haunted by the riddle of the English patient, the nameless, burned man who lies in an
upstairs room and whose memories of passion, betrayal, and rescue illuminate this book like flashes of heat lightning.
Caravaggio, an Italian-Canadian in the British foreign intelligence service since the late 1930s, befriended Hana's father
before the latter died in the war He had remained in North Africa to spy when the German forces gain control and then
transfers to Italy. He is eventually caught, they even cut off his thumbs. Caravaggio bears physical and psychological scars
from his painful war experience for which he seeks vengeance.
Kip decides to stay at the villa to attempt to clear it of unexploded ordnance. Kip and the English patient immediately
become friends. The English patient, sedated by morphine, begins to reveal everything: he fell in love with the
Englishwoman Katharine Clifton who, with her husband Geoffrey, accompanied Almásy's desert exploration team. Almásy
was mesmerized by Katharine's voice as she read Herodotus' Histories out loud by the campfire. They soon began a very
intense affair, but she cut it short, claiming that Geoffrey would go mad if he were to discover them.
On the way of Cairo, the plane crashes and Katherine got injured internally and Geoffrey got killed in an outright. Almásy
leaves her in the Cave of Swimmers, to make a three-day trek to British-controlled El Taj for help. When he arrives, he is
detained as a spy because of his name. He later guides German spies across the desert to Cairo. Almásy retrieves
Katharine's dead body from the Cave and, while flying back, the decrepit plane leaks oil onto him and both of them catch
fire. He parachutes from the plane and is found severely burned by the Bedouin.
The novel ends with Kip learning that the U.S. has bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He departs from Villa San Girolamo,
estranged from his white companions.

Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha
Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha is a coming-of-age novel, narrated by 10 year old Patrick Clarke. The boy narrates a year of his life
as he transitions from carefree prankster to man of the house when his parents’ marriage falls apart. With his use of
clipped dialogue, Irish vernacular, and stream-of-consciousness narration, Doyle vividly depicts the small but meaningful
everyday experiences and emotions of his naïve child narrator.
The novel, chronicling Paddy's internal journey towards maturity, is a bildungsroman as it centres upon the main
character's development. Paddy's growing up is painfully bitter. While the beginning of the book is filled with playful
antics, the growing antagonism between his parents and the breaking up of their marriage are evident as the novel moves
on. What makes Paddy's rite of passage, as it were, all the more tragic is the fact that he does not choose his "journey of
enlightenment and maturity", rather, he is robbed of it when his parents become estranged from one another.
Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha is set in the late 1960s in the fictional north Dublin community of Barrytown. Patrick is the oldest
child (Sinbad Francis is his younger brother) in a working-class family. It begins with him being a mischievous boy roaming
around local Barrytown and ends with his father departing from the family, forcing the boy to take up adult
responsibilities in his now single-parent home.

How Late it was, How Late

Sammy, a 38-year old unemployed Scotsman and petty criminal, wakes up in the gutter on a Sunday morning in Glasgow
after a weekend of heavy drinking. He has been lifted by the police (“the sodjers”), gets a beating from them, and finds
himself blind. The plot of the novel follows Sammy as he explores and comes to terms with his new-found disability, and
the difficulties this brings. Told in the utterly uncensored language of the Scottish working class, this is a dark and subtly
political parable of struggle and survival, rich with irony and black humour.
Upon being released Sammy goes back to his house and realises that his girlfriend, Helen, is gone, but makes no attempt
to find her. For a while, Sammy struggles with the simple tasks that blindness makes difficult. Soon, Sammy realises he
will need something to indicate his blindness to other people. He cuts the head off of an old mop and, with the help of his
neighbour, Boab, paints it white. He also purchases a pair of sunglasses to cover his eyes. He goes out with the stick to
buy himself a pair of "shades" (sunglasses) and register at a medical centre to get an actual walking stick and a guide dog
perhaps. When having his form filled at the centre, he states that he does not seek any compensation from the police for
his loss of sight. He arranges an appointment with a doctor for Monday morning.
On Sunday morning, when he takes a bath, he is surprised by police and arrested. The police questions him about Helen
who disappeared. He is also suspected that he stole several shirts, which were found in the flat, and intended to sell them
illegally. Also, he is suspected of manslaughter when the "cunt" (person) whom he shared the cell with is found dead. The
most serious suspicion is however about his contacts with whom the police calls political terrorists and Sammy claims to
be but drinking buddies.
On Monday morning, the police takes him to the appointment with the doctor. There is a man called Ally who forces
himself upon Sammy as his "rep" (legal representative) and intends to put the case on the trial and demand
compensation on Sammy's behalf. If the case is won, the compensation will be shared between them. Sammy stubbornly
refuses and tricks Ally to get rid of him. Under nightmarish conditions, he undertakes the journey home from the medical
centre, alone and without his walking stick.
Sammy goes into a pub, hoping to meet Helen there, but she is nowhere to find. His old friends avoids him there because
Sammy now suspected as political terrorist by Police. Sammy decided to elope but failed because of the weather. Later
his son Peter comes to visit him and helps him with money to escape the city.

The Ghost Road

The Ghost Road is the final book in the Regeneration Trilogy, (Regeneration, The Eye in the Door) and the culminating
masterpiece of Pat Barker's towering World War I fiction trilogy. The story deals with shell-shocked soldiers in the
aftermath WW-1. The title refers to the way survivors view the dead during the war. Dead soldiers and civilians are said to
walk a “ghost road,” moving in the opposite direction of the living, who must continue to advance forward. As the events
of the novel lead up to the conclusion of the war, the title also comes to represent the choice each character has to make:
whether to go forward and continue to fight or return to the comforts of the past.
The fictional character Billy Prior young aged (High school teen), who is now a working-class British army officer who is
being treated by the real-life psychiatrist William Rivers (doctor of Shell Shocked soldiers), at Craiglockheart Military
Hospital for what would today be recognized as PTSD. Against William’s suggestion, Prior is eager to re-join the fighting as
part of the “final push” into France, as he believes this massive military campaign will guarantee a British victory and also
justify the massive loss of life that has taken place over the past four years. In addition, Charles Manning, a retired army
officer with whom Prior is involved in a sexual relationship, manages to secure Prior a desk job so he will not have to go
back to the battlefield, but Prior turns it down.
Later Prior sex with his fiancé Sarah Lumb, during their sex the condom brakes and Prior hoping for a child but when he
founds that she isn’t pregnant, he feels disappointed and melancholy.
The soldiers march dutifully from town to town, while it gradually becomes clear that there is little chance that they will
ever win the war. Finally, at the end of Prior’s narrative, he and his men are pressured into confronting a German
squadron in a suicide mission, during which Prior is killed.
After Prior’s death the narrative shifts to William, who was an Anthropologist at Solomon’s island. He realized the British
and the people of the island have similarities, what turns him in to a Psychiatrist. Despite his best efforts, Rivers begins to
feel that he has failed, in recovering the soldiers. His sense of failure paralyzes him, ensuring that he can’t complete his
anthropological book.
While primarily a novel about war and recovery, The Ghost Road is also deeply indebted to the tenants of Freudian
psychology. Both Rivers and Prior have events in their past that have shaped them into the people that they are, and both
try to repress their true nature and fight wars within themselves that are as real and threatening as the war between
nations that rages outside of them.
This duality of internal and external conflict is echoed by the state of the Solomon Islands. Though the people who live on
the island do not participate in the World War, they are constantly under threat to give up their way of life. Just as Prior
and Rivers must fight to retain their sense of self, the Solomons must constantly fight for their own existence against
external powers.

Last Orders
“Last Orders” is a 1996 novel by the British author Graham Swift, an homage to William Faulkner’s “As I Lay Dying”.
The story makes much use of flashbacks to tell the convoluted story of the relationships between a group of war veterans
who live in the same corner of London, the backbone of the story being the journey of the group from Bermondsey to
Margate to scatter the ashes of Jack Dodds into the sea, in accord with his last wishes. The narrative is split into short
sections told by the main characters as well as updates along the journey at Old Kent Road, New Cross, Blackheath,
Dartford, Gravesend, Rochester, Chatham Naval Memorial and Canterbury Cathedral. The title 'Last Orders' not only
refers to these instructions as stipulated in Jack Dodd's will, but also alludes to the 'last orders (of the day)' - the last
round of drinks to be ordered before a pub closes, as drinking was a favourite pastime of Jack and the other characters.
 The God of Small Things
The God of Small Things is Arundhati Roy’s first and only fiction novel. The story spans two dozen years, jumping back and
forth, through flashbacks and flash forwards, from 1969 when fraternal twins Rahel and Estha were 7 years old, and then
to 1993, when they reunite at age 31. The novel comes to a close with a nostalgic recounting of Ammu and Velutha's love
affair. Equal parts powerful family saga, forbidden love story, and piercing political drama, it is the story of an affluent
Indian family forever changed by one fateful day in 1969. The seven-year-old twins Estha and Rahel see their world
shaken irrevokably by the arrival of their beautiful young cousin, Sophie. It is an event that will lead this popular piece to
some other stories. Rightly, it is a sad yet lovely look Indian politics and the caste system, as well as more universal
themes like betrayal, family and love – things we can all relate to.to an illicit liaison and tragedies accidental and
intentional, exposing “big things [that] lurk unsaid” in a country drifting dangerously toward unrest. Lush, lyrical, and
unnerving.
**The band Darlingside credits the novel as the inspiration for their song "The God of Loss".

Amsterdam
Amsterdam is British novelist Ian McEwan’s historical thriller detailing two friends who make a euthanasia pact—and
whose relationship takes an ugly turn. The book, written in 1998, is a satirical, darkly funny examination of modern times
and modern morality.
On a chilly February day, two old friends meet in the throng outside a London crematorium to pay their last respects to
Molly Lane. Both Clive Linley and Vernon Halliday had been Molly's lovers in the days before they reached their current
eminence: Clive is Britain's most successful modern composer, and Vernon is editor of the newspaper The Judge.
Gorgeous, feisty Molly had other lovers, too, notably Julian Garmony, Foreign Secretary, a notorious right-winger tipped
to be the next prime minister.
Vernon receives some personal and private photographs from Moly’s present husband George, which can affect
Germony’s right wing political carrier. He also wants some support from Clive, who refuses to do so. Though initially
Vernon looks good in his plan and appreciated by his company, but with the involvement of Germony’s wife Vernon
forced to accept the bitterness of loss. On the other hand Clive also failed to compose his most awaiting Millennial
Composition, which also makes him frustrated. However with the rolling of the tory the friendship between Vernon and
Clive turns into enmity. Both of them reach to Amsterdam and exploit their wishes of euthanasia as well as the pact of
euthanasia.
Garmony and George Lane are sent out to retrieve the bodies, Garmony on behalf of the government for Clive and
George on behalf of Vernon's widow, Mandy. Garmony learns it was actually a double murder and informs George, who is
pleased. George reflects on the fact that two of Molly's former lovers are dead and Garmony, despite having weathered
the scandal, will never be able to rise in the party. He contemplates asking out Vernon's widow Mandy.

Disgrace
Set in post-apartheid South Africa, J. M. Coetzee’s searing novel tells the story of David Lurie, a twice divorced, 52-year-
old professor of communications and Romantic Poetry at Cape Technical University. Lurie believes he has created a
comfortable, if somewhat passionless, life for himself. He lives within his financial and emotional means. Though his
position at the university has been reduced, he teaches his classes dutifully; and while age has diminished his
attractiveness, weekly visits to a prostitute satisfy his sexual needs. He considers himself happy. However, when Lurie
seduces one of his students, he sets in motion a chain of events that will shatter his complacency and leave him utterly
disgraced.
Additionally, sex and sexual attraction fuel many of the characters’ decisions, especially the main character, David’s. His
frequenting and ultimate obsession and refusal by a prostitute send his life into its downward spiral, and the way he plays
the game of sexual conquest ruins his career. Sex is presented as a matter of conquest, and then ultimately, as a weapon,
as Lucy’s rape is reflected in David’s rape of Melanie. In the end, these sexual encounters are statements of power, and
the effects of the rapes serve to underline who has the power, who wants it, and how it can be wielded.

The Blind Assassin

Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin is actually three narratives in one (novel within a novel). In the novel’s frame
narrative, the protagonist Iris Chase, and her sister Laura, grow up well-off but motherless in a small town in Southern
Ontario. As an old woman, Iris recalls the events and relationships of her childhood, youth and middle age, including her
unhappy marriage to Toronto businessman Richard Griffen.
Iris Chase writes her family's history for her estranged granddaughter, Sabrina. In this family history, she tells the story of
her sister, Laura, a troubled young woman who committed suicide by driving off a bridge. Laura has since become famous
thanks to the posthumous publication of her novel, The Blind Assassin.
Iris and Laura live with their parents at Avilion, the family estate. Captain Chase owns a button factory in Port
Ticonderoga, Canada. During the Great Depression, the business fails, and Captain Chase arranges a marriage between
eighteen-year-old Iris and Richard Griffen, a wealthy businessman who agrees to save the factory.
Griffen breaks his word, and the button factory closes while he and Iris are on their honeymoon. Captain Chase dies, but
Richard hides this fact from Iris until they return. After her father's death, Laura's behaviour becomes erratic. After a
short stay in a mental hospital, Laura tells Iris that Richard forced her to have an abortion after impregnating her.
Laura commits suicide after learning of the death of Alex Thomas, a union organizer and Iris's lover. Iris takes her revenge
on Richard by writing and publishing The Blind Assassin under Laura's name, sparking an investigation into Laura's death.
Richard's political career is ruined, and he commits suicide. Near penniless, Iris loses custody of her daughter Aimee
Adelia Griffen, who becomes a drug addict. Iris writes a second book in hopes of reconciling with her granddaughter.

True History of Kelly Gang

The novel is an autobiography and classic outlaw tale which divided into thirteen sections, based on the adventures of the
Kelly Gang and surviving writings of the Australian folk hero, Ned Kelly.
In True History of the Kelly Gang, the legendary Ned Kelly speaks for himself, scribbling his narrative on errant scraps of
paper in semiliterate but magically descriptive prose as he flees from the police. To his pursuers, Kelly is nothing but a
monstrous criminal, a thief and a murderer. To his own people, the lowly class of ordinary Australians, the bushranger is a
hero, defying the authority of the English to direct their lives. Indentured by his bootlegger mother to a famous horse
thief (who was also her lover), Ned saw his first prison cell at 15 and by the age of 26 had become the most wanted man
in the wild colony of Victoria, taking over whole towns and defying the law until he was finally captured and hanged at
Glenrowan.
Kelly's narrative stops abruptly just before the shootout itself; a secondary narrator, identified as "S.C", relates the tale of
the gunfight and Kelly's death by hanging. Since Curnow is shown to have escaped Glenrowan with Kelly's manuscripts, it
is assumed that this narrator is a relative of Curnow's. Kelly dies a hero to the people of north eastern Victoria, with the
legend of his life left to grow over time.

Life of Pi
Life of Pi by novelist Yann Martel is the tale of Piscine Molitor Patel, known as Pi. Pi is an Indian boy who survives for 227
days on a lifeboat on the Pacific Ocean following a shipwreck. His is stranded with a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. Pi
has to come to terms with his spirituality, with his belief in God, and the basic human instinct for survival. The book opens
with a fictional note from the author that serves as a frame to the main story. 'Life of Pi' is told from two alternating
points of view, the main character Pi in a flashback and Yann Martel himself, who is the "visiting writer" (Martel 101)
interviewing Pi many years after the tiger in the boat story. This technique of the intrusive narrator adds the documentary
realism to the book,
The first part of the novel, tell us about the protagonist Piscine Patel, who is by born a Canadian and resident in India.
Raised up as a Hindu and practices vegetarianism. As his school friends bullies him as Pissing, he turns the name into
more short as Pi (Mathamatical transcendental number, the ratio of the circumference and the diameter of a circle.).
During the period of Emergency in 1976, by Indira Gandhi, the family decided to leave the country India and decided to
sell their Zoo and migrate to Canada with family.
In the second part of the novel the family aboard the Tsimtsum a Japanese freighter that transporting animals from their
zoo to North America. But the ship encounters a storm and started to sink. Pi escapes in a lifeboat, where he finds a
spotted hyena, Grant Zebra and an Orangutan, named Orange Juice. A Bengal tiger Richard Parker has been hiding under
the boat's tarpaulin, who saves Pi from the attack of the Hyena by killing it and then they eat it. Soon, Pi asserts the tiger
as the alpha animal, and is eventually able to share the boat with his feline companion. Pi recounts various events while
adrift in the Pacific Ocean. At his lowest point, exposure renders him blind and unable to catch fish. In a state of delirium,
he talks with a marine "echo", which he initially identifies as Richard Parker having gained the ability to speak, but it turns
out to be another blind castaway, a Frenchman, who boards the lifeboat with the intention of killing and eating Pi, but is
immediately killed by Richard Parker.
Two hundred and twenty-seven days after the ship's sinking, the lifeboat washes onto a beach in Mexico, after which
Richard Parker disappears into the nearby jungle without looking back, leaving Pi heartbroken at the abrupt farewell.
The third part of the novel describes a conversation between Pi and two officials from the Japanese Ministry of Transport.
They meet him at the hospital in Mexico where he is recovering. Pi tells them his tale, but the officials reject it as
unbelievable. Pi then offers them a second story in which he is adrift on a lifeboat not with zoo animals, but with the
ship's cook, a Taiwanese sailor with a broken leg, and his own mother. The cook amputates the sailor's leg for use as
fishing bait, then kills the sailor himself as well as Pi's mother for food, and soon he is killed by Pi, who dines on him. The
investigators note parallels between the two stories. They soon conclude that the hyena symbolizes the cook, the zebra
the sailor, the orangutan Pi's mother, and the tiger represents Pi. As Pi asks the officials which story they prefer: the one
without animals or the one with animals. They eventually choose the story with the animals. The investigators then leave
and file a report.

Vernon God Little

Vernon God Little is a darkly comic novel, it focuses on the title teenager, Vernon Little, who lives in a small town in Texas
in the aftermath of a horrible school shooting where Vernon’s best friend killed sixteen students followed by himself.
Although Vernon was not involved in the shooting and had no knowledge of his friend’s plans, the townspeople are
consumed with a desire for answers and vengeance, and their cruel scrutiny soon falls on Vernon as they seek to make
him a scapegoat.
The life of Vernon Little, a normal teenager who lives in Martirio, Texas, falls apart when his best friend, Jesus Navarro,
murders their classmates in the schoolyard before killing himself, and Vernon is taken in for questioning. When the court-
appointed shrink, Dr. Goosens, touches him inappropriately, Vernon leaves, knowing it can wreck hopes for bail. Vernon's
bail hearing suggests a possible alibi and no grounds for holding him, so Vernon is released as Goosens' outpatient,
subject to regular sessions. But when he skips a session with Goosens and word comes that his rifle has been found, he
extorts money from an old pervert by photographing him with Ella and catches a bus to San Antonio. There he phones
Taylor, his crush, and meets her in Houston where she attends college. However, their meeting ends when Taylor turns
out to be Leona's niece.
Vernon sneaks into Mexico, where a truck driver named Pelayo takes him to the beach resort in Acapulco. He turns
sixteen there. After spending the summer in the Harris County lock-up, he’s put on trial in a televised spectacle. Vernon
trusts the system to find out the truth, and his lawyer exposes Goosen’s criminal behavior, which discredits his testimony.
It’s proved that Taylor and Lally trapped him, but his defense falls apart when Pelayo can’t clear him because Vernon used
an alibi in Mexico. Vernon is relying on Nuckles’ testimony to clear him, but Nuckles has been convinced that Vernon was
involved. Vernon is found not guilty of the murders, but guilty of being involved in Jesus’ shooting.
He’s sentenced to death row, and his execution will be televised as part of a twisted reality show run by Lally where
people vote on which convict they want to see die next. Vernon survives several votes, but eventually his number comes
up. He tries to make the most of his time before his death, and puts together a conspiracy to entrap Lally and expose the
scheme that framed him. It works, and also exposes Goosens and Nuckles as pedophiles. Vernon is pardoned seconds
before he is executed by lethal injection. As the book ends, Vernon and Ella (one of the only classmates to believe his
innocence) go on vacation to Mexico, as Vernon’s life finally goes back to normal.

The Line of Beauty

Alan Hollinghurst’s historical fiction The Line of Beauty (2004) was the first work classified in the genre of gay literature to
receive the U.K.’s Booker Prize. Set in the London underground gay scene of the early 1980s, an era that was known for its
vibrant urban club culture, gay civil rights protests, and the simultaneous panic about the AIDS crisis. It also takes place
during Britain’s political uncertainty and turmoil, combining these large narrative threads into a novelistic outcome that is
both ironic and tragic.
The novel is set in Britain in three parts, taking place in 1983, 1986 and 1987. The story surrounds the young gay
protagonist, Nick Guest. Nick is middle-class and from the fictional market town of Barwick in Northamptonshire; he has
graduated from Worcester College, Oxford with a First in English and is to begin postgraduate studies at University
College London. Many of the significant characters in the novel are Nick's male contemporaries from Oxford.
The book explores the tension between Nick's intimate relationship with the Fedden family, in whose parties and holidays
he participates, and the realities of his sexuality and gay life, which the Feddens accept only to the extent of never
mentioning it. It explores themes of hypocrisy, homosexuality, madness and privilege, with the emerging AIDS crisis
forming a backdrop to the book's conclusion.
 Arthur and George
Set at the turn of the 20th century, the story follows the separate but intersecting lives of two very different British men:
a half-Indian solicitor and son of a Vicar, George Edalji, and the world-famous author of the Sherlock Holmes stories, Sir
Arthur Conan Doyle. Roughly one-third of the book traces the story of Edalji's trial, conviction, and imprisonment for a
crime he did not commit. About one-third of the book traces the story of Doyle's life and his relationships with his first
wife Louisa Hawkins and his platonic lover Jean Leckie. Roughly one-third of the book concerns Doyle's attempt to clear
the name of Edalji and uncover the true culprit of the crime. Julian Barnes called it "a contemporary novel set in the past"
and the book does not aim to stick closely to the historical record at every point.

The Inheritance of Loss

The Inheritance of Loss, a 2006 book by Kiran Desai, explores immigration, identity, and relationships on both the
interpersonal and international scale. Spanning India, England, and the United States, the novel details the conflict
between traditional Indian ways of life and the shiny opulence of Western nations. The Gorkhaland movement is used
as a historic backdrop of the novel. The novel begins at Cho Oyu in 1986. A group of Nepali-Indian insurgents robs
the judge’s guns from the house, humiliating the proud old man.
The story is centered on two main characters: Biju and Sai. Biju is an undocumented Indian immigrant living in the United
States, son of a cook who works for Sai's grandfather. Sai is a girl living in mountainous Kalimpong with her maternal
grandfather Jemubhai Patel, the cook and a dog named Mutt. Desai switches the narration between both points of view.
The action of the novel takes place in 1986. The novel follows the journey of Biju, an undocumented immigrant in the US
who is trying to make a new life; and Sai, an Anglicised Indian girl living with her grandfather in India.
The novel shows the internal conflicts between the opportunities for money in the US, and the squalor of living in India.
The major theme running throughout is one closely related to colonialism and the effects of post-colonialism. The text
show snobbery at those who embody the Indian way of life and vice versa, with characters displaying an anger at the
English Indians who have lost their traditions.
The retired judge Jemubhai Patel is a man disgusted at Indian ways and customs, so much so, that he eats chapatis with a
knife and fork, hates all Indians including his father whom he breaks ties with and wife who he abandons at his father's
place after torturing her, and is never accepted by the British in spite of his education and adopted mannerisms.

The Gathering
The Gathering, traces the narrator's inner journey, setting out to derive meaning from past and present events, and takes
place in Ireland and England. The novel is a moving, evocative portrait of a large Irish family and a shot of fresh blood into
the Irish literary tradition, combining the lyricism of the old with the shock of the new. The nine surviving children of the
Hegarty clan are gathering in Dublin for the wake of their wayward brother, Liam, drowned in the sea. His sister,
Veronica, collects the body and keeps the dead man company, guarding the secret she shares with him—something that
happened in their grandmother’s house in the winter of 1968. As Enright traces the line of betrayal and redemption
through three generations her distinctive intelligence twists the world a fraction and gives it back to us in a new and
unforgettable light. The Gathering is a daring, witty, and insightful family epic, clarified through Anne Enright’s unblinking
eye. It is a novel about love and disappointment, about how memories warp and secrets fester, and how fate is written in
the body, not in the stars.

The White Tiger

ritically lauded but controversial, The White Tiger examines the dark underbelly of contemporary Indian society, its caste
system, and its place in the globalized world through the tale of an entrepreneur escaping rural poverty. The novel is
stylistically unusual in that the entire narrative takes the form of a letter written by the central character, Balram, to Wen
Jiabao, the Chinese Premier, who is due to visit India to discuss business and entrepreneurship. Through this letter,
Balram describes his own life story and how he rose from a poor child in a rural village to the prosperous figure he is now,
presenting himself as an example of successful entrepreneurship.
Balram Halwai is a complicated man. Servant. Philosopher. Entrepreneur. Murderer. Over the course of seven nights, by
the scattered light of a preposterous chandelier, Balram tells us the terrible and transfixing story of how he came to be a
success in life—having nothing but his own wits to help him along.
Born in the dark heart of India, Balram gets a break when he is hired as a driver for his village's wealthiest man, two house
Pomeranians (Puddles and Cuddles), and the rich man's (very unlucky) son. From behind the wheel of their Honda City
car, Balram's new world is a revelation. While his peers flip through the pages of Murder Weekly ("Love -- Rape --
Revenge!"), barter for girls, drink liquor (Thunderbolt), and perpetuate the Great Rooster Coop of Indian society, Balram
watches his employers bribe foreign ministers for tax breaks, barter for girls, drink liquor (single-malt whiskey), and play
their own role in the Rooster Coop. Balram learns how to siphon gas, deal with corrupt mechanics, and refill and resell
Johnnie Walker Black Label bottles (all but one). He also finds a way out of the Coop that no one else inside it can
perceive.
Balram's eyes penetrate India as few outsiders can: the cockroaches and the call centers; the prostitutes and the
worshippers; the ancient and Internet cultures; the water buffalo and, trapped in so many kinds of cages that escape is
(almost) impossible, the white tiger. And with a charisma as undeniable as it is unexpected, Balram teaches us that
religion doesn't create virtue, and money doesn't solve every problem -- but decency can still be found in a corrupt world,
and you can get what you want out of life if you eavesdrop on the right conversations.
The White Tiger recalls The Death of Vishnu and Bangkok 8 in ambition, scope, and narrative genius, with a mischief and
personality all its own. Amoral, irreverent, deeply endearing, and utterly contemporary, this novel is an international
publishing sensation —and a startling, provocative debut.

Wolf Hall
In the ruthless arena of King Henry VIII’s court, only one man dares to gamble his life to win the king’s favour and ascend
to the heights of political power.
England in the 1520s is a heartbeat from disaster. If the king dies without a male heir, the country could be destroyed by
civil war. Henry VIII wants to annul his marriage of twenty years, and marry Anne Boleyn. The pope and most of Europe
opposes him. The quest for the king’s freedom destroys his adviser, the brilliant Cardinal Wolsey, and leaves a power
vacuum.
Into this impasse steps Thomas Cromwell. Cromwell is a wholly original man, a charmer and a bully, both idealist and
opportunist, astute in reading people and a demon of energy: he is also a consummate politician, hardened by his
personal losses, implacable in his ambition. But Henry is volatile: one day tender, one day murderous. Cromwell helps him
break the opposition, but what will be the price of his triumph?
In inimitable style, Hilary Mantel presents a picture of a half-made society on the cusp of change, where individuals fight
or embrace their fate with passion and courage. With a vast array of characters, overflowing with incident, the novel re-
creates an era when the personal and political are separated by a hairbreadth, where success brings unlimited power but
a single failure means death.

The Finkler Question

The novel, tells the story of three friends—Julian Treslove, Sam Finkler, and Libor Sevcik—as they explore what it means
to be Jewish, ultimately coming to very different conclusions about their respective identities and their places in a
historically antisemitic world.
Julian Treslove, a professionally unspectacular and disappointed BBC worker, and Sam Finkler, a popular Jewish
philosopher, writer and television personality, are old school friends. Despite a prickly relationship and very different
lives, they've never quite lost touch with each other - or with their former teacher, Libor Sevcik, a Czechoslovakian always
more concerned with the wider world than with exam results. Now, both Libor and Finkler are recently widowed, and
with Treslove, his chequered and unsuccessful record with women rendering him an honorary third widower, they dine at
Libor's grand, central London apartment. It's a sweetly painful evening of reminiscence in which all three remove
themselves to a time before they had loved and lost; a time before they had fathered children, before the devastation of
separations, before they had prized anything greatly enough to fear the loss of it. Better, perhaps, to go through life
without knowing happiness at all because that way you had less to mourn? Treslove finds he has tears enough for the
unbearable sadness of both his friends' losses. And it's that very evening, at exactly 11:30pm, as Treslove hesitates a
moment outside the window of the oldest violin dealer in the country as he walks home, that he is attacked. After this, his
whole sense of who and what he is will slowly and ineluctably change.

The Sense of an Ending

The novel is divided into two parts, entitled "One" and "Two", both narrated by a retired man named Tony Webster, the
book centers around his friendship with a young man named Adrian Finn back when he was in school, and the events that
eventually tore them apart. When the past catches up with Tony, he is forced to confront the paths that he and his
friends have taken in life. Exploring themes such as death, regret, and reminiscence, The Sense of an Ending is noted for
its unconventional narration: both parts are narrated by Tony, but they skip back and forth between Tony’s teen years
with Adrian and the arrival of a mysterious document during his twilight years. The Sense of an Ending was critically
acclaimed by the majority of reviewers, although some found its bleak tone off-putting.
Suzanne Dean designed the cover for The Sense of an Ending. The cover shows floating dandelion seeds, with the edges
of the page blackened.
The first part begins in the 1960s with four intellectually arrogant school friends, of whom two feature in the remainder of
the story: Tony, the narrator, and Adrian, the most precociously intelligent of the four. Towards the end of their school
days another boy at the school hangs himself, apparently after getting a girl pregnant. The four friends discuss the
philosophical difficulty of knowing exactly what happened. Adrian goes to Cambridge University and Tony to Bristol
University. Tony acquires a girlfriend, Veronica, at whose family home he spends an awkward weekend. On waking one
morning he finds that he and Veronica's mother, Sarah, are alone in the house, and she apologises for her family's
behaviour towards him. Tony and Veronica's relationship fails in some acrimony, as he breaks up with her, and has sex
with her after breaking up. In his final year at university Tony receives a letter from Adrian informing him that he is going
out with Veronica. Tony replies to the letter, telling Adrian that in his opinion Veronica was damaged in some way and
that he should talk to her mother about it. Some months later he is told that Adrian has committed suicide, leaving a note
addressed to the coroner saying that the free person has a philosophical duty to examine the nature of their life, and may
then choose to renounce it. Tony admires the reasoning. He briefly recounts the following uneventful forty years of his
life until his sixties.
At this point Tony's narration of the second part of the novel – which is twice as long as the first – begins, with the arrival
of a lawyer's letter informing him that Veronica's mother has bequeathed him £500 (which she mysteriously calls "blood
money") and two documents. These lead him to re-establish contact with Veronica. On consulting the lawyers, Tony
learns that Veronica has Adrian's diary. This leads him to send Veronica repeated e-mails requesting the diary. Veronica
eventually sends Tony a single page of the diary, containing Adrian's musings on life as a series of cumulative wagers.
Following this, Veronica meets Tony on the Millennium Bridge in London and gives him the letter he sent to Adrian in his
youth. On re-reading it, Tony realises how malicious and unpleasant it was, and how he has erased this from his memory.
Nevertheless, he persists in attempting to retrieve the diary from Veronica, which leads to her asking him to meet at a
location in North London, where she drives him to see a group of mentally handicapped men being taken for a walk by
their careworker, one of whom she points out to him. Tony does not understand the significance of this and Veronica
leaves him with no explanation. Over the course of several weeks, Tony revisits the location until he is able to relocate the
man Veronica showed him in a pub. Tony greets the man saying he is a friend of Veronica's which leads to an upset
response from the man. Tony recalls the memory of Adrian from the man's facial features. He e-mails Veronica an
apology, saying he didn't realise that she and Adrian had a son together. Veronica only responds with the reply "You don't
get it, but then you never did." On revisiting the pub where he saw the man, Tony gets into conversation with the
careworker, who reveals that the man is actually the son of Veronica's mother, Sarah, making him Veronica's half-brother.
We are left to connect the dots, presuming that Adrian is the father and that the birth of this damaged son may be the
reason for his suicide.

Bring up the Bodies

The sequel to Hilary Mantel's international bestseller and Man Booker Prize winner Wolf Hall explores one of the most
mystifying and frightening episodes in English history: the downfall of Anne Boleyn. The story begins shortly after the
conclusion of the first book in the trilogy, Wolf Hall. Thomas Cromwell, the son of working class parents and a lawyer by
trade, has risen to the rank of Master Secretary to the King’s Privy Council through his many political allies. He is the
King’s right-hand man, but that’s not all–the King also thinks of him rather as a brother figure.
The story opens with animal imagery: Thomas’ hawks (whom he named after his deceased daughters) diving down from
the sky onto their prey. Thomas, the book’s intelligent and observant narrator, is staying with the King at Wolf Hall.
Although the King previously tried for seven years to marry Anne Boleyn, his second wife, but now he is unhappy.
When the King is seriously injured in a jousting accident, it is thought he will not survive. Because he lacks a male heir,
relations and noblemen rush in to claim the throne, and civil war looms. Anne, who is currently pregnant, hears the news
of the King’s accident, and goes into shock, miscarrying a male child. Though the King survives, Anne’s miscarriage is more
or less the final straw. He wants a divorce. Because divorce is prohibited by the Church, the King risks any future heirs
being named illegitimate. if he cannot find a way to legally separate from Anne and marry Jane. Thomas pledges to find a
solution for him.
Despite the fact that Anne is one of his earliest political allies, Thomas hatches a new plan to bring her down by
destroying her reputation. Eventually, he collects enough evidence (though he privately acknowledges that some of it is
false) that he is able to have Anne arrested on capital charges of cheating on the King with seven different men, one of
whom is her brother. She is found guilty of treason and executed, along with her brother and several other confidants.
Before her death, however, her final words sing the praises of the King in a last-ditch effort to appease him. The effort
fails.
For his part, Thomas receives a barony, as well as the satisfaction of having avenged his mentor. The title, Bring Up The
Bodies, refers both to the disposal of the remains of the executed from the Tower of London and to the “ghosts” that
haunt Thomas from his past: his wife and daughters, Cardinal Wolsey, etc. Jane wins “the poisoned ring” of marriage to
the King, and the couple is able to focus on producing a male heir while Thomas steps in to handle several affairs of state,
including diplomacy with France and the Holy Roman Empire. He says that there are no endings, only beginnings. Similar
to how the novel began, it ends with animal imagery: a fox attacking a hen house.

The Luminaries
The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton is an eerie, historical literary mystery, set in 1866 at the height of New Zealand’s gold
rush. The novel takes place in and out of a small town called Hokitika, on the west coast of New Zealand. The protagonist
is prospector Walter Moody, though the book is dense with characters and interwoven plots, and many characters
narrate the events of the mysterious happenings in Hokitika. The book ultimately ends where it began, after delving into
the nasty intricacies of life in a gold rush town in a historically distant world, including the real stories behind the
disappearance of a wealthy man and the suicide of a local prostitute.
The novel’s intricate structure revolves around the twelve signs of the zodiac and the interactions of the planets with
those signs and with each other. Each chapter is named with the sign of the character who is the primary figure or
narrator of that chapter. The characters include Sook Yongsheng, a hatter (Aquarius), Rau Tauwhare, a hunter (Aries),
Charlie Frost, a banker (Taurus), newspaperman Benjamin Lowenthal (Gemini), Edgar Clinch, the owner of a local hotelier
(Cancer), Thomas Balfour, a shipping agent (Sagittarius), etc.. Other characters, such as Walter Moody, are given
planetary signs. Moody is Mercury, for instance, while the novel’s femme fatale Lydia Wells is Venus.
As the novel unfolds, each character reveals his or her particular contribution to the mysteries troubling the small town of
Hokitika. Within those narratives are tales of ghost stories, opium dens, sex, love affairs, prostitution, murder,
backstabbing, and more. All the characters, it seems, are out to get their fill of luxury before the looming and inevitable
bust.

The Narrow Road to the Deep North (2013)

A novel of the cruelty of war, and tenuousness of life and the impossibility of love. Richard Flanagan's story — of Dorrigo
Evans, an Australian doctor haunted by a love affair with his uncle's wife — journeys from the caves of Tasmanian
trappers in the early twentieth century to a crumbling pre-war beachside hotel, from a Thai jungle prison to a Japanese
snow festival, from the Changi gallows to a chance meeting of lovers on the Sydney Harbour Bridge.
Taking its title from 17th-century haiku poet Basho's travel journal, The Narrow Road to the Deep North is about the
impossibility of love. At its heart is one day in a Japanese slave labour camp in August 1943. As the day builds to its
horrific climax, Dorrigo Evans battles and fails in his quest to save the lives of his fellow POWs, a man is killed for no
reason, and a love story unfolds.

A Brief history of Seven Killings (2014)

On December 3, 1976, just before the Jamaican general election and two days before Bob Marley was to play the Smile
Jamaica Concert, gunmen stormed his house, machine guns blazing. The attack nearly killed the Reggae superstar, his
wife, and his manager, and injured several others. Marley would go on to perform at the free concert on December 5, but
he left the country the next day, not to return for two years.
Deftly spanning decades and continents and peopled with a wide range of characters—assassins, journalists, drug dealers,
and even ghosts—A Brief History of Seven Killings is the fictional exploration of that dangerous and unstable time and its
bloody aftermath, from the streets and slums of Kingston in the 70s, to the crack wars in 80s New York, to a radically
altered Jamaica in the 90s.
**The novel has five sections, each named after a musical track and covering the events of a single day,
“Original Rockers: December 2, 1976”
“Ambush in the Night: December 3, 1976”
“Shadow Dancin’: February 15, 1979”
“White Lines/Kids in America: August 14, 1985”
“Sound Boy Killing: March 22, 1991”
 The Sellouts (2015)
A biting satire about a young man's isolated upbringing and the race trial that sends him to the Supreme Court, Paul
Beatty's The Sellout showcases a comic genius at the top of his game. It challenges the sacred tenets of the United States
Constitution, urban life, the civil rights movement, the father-son relationship, and the holy grail of racial equality―the
black Chinese restaurant. The novel concerns a narrator, referred to only by his last name, "Me", or “Bon bon”.
Born in the "agrarian ghetto" of Dickens―on the southern outskirts of Los Angeles―the narrator of The Sellout resigns
himself to the fate of lower-middle-class Californians: "I'd die in the same bedroom I'd grown up in, looking up at the
cracks in the stucco ceiling that've been there since '68 quake." Raised by a single father, a controversial sociologist, he
spent his childhood as the subject in racially charged psychological studies. He is led to believe that his father's pioneering
work will result in a memoir that will solve his family's financial woes. But when his father is killed in a police shoot-out,
he realizes there never was a memoir. All that's left is the bill for a drive-thru funeral.
Fueled by this deceit and the general disrepair of his hometown, the narrator sets out to right another wrong: Dickens has
literally been removed from the map to save California from further embarrassment. Enlisting the help of the town's most
famous resident―the last surviving Little Rascal, Hominy Jenkins―he initiates the most outrageous action conceivable:
reinstating slavery and segregating the local high school, which lands him in the Supreme Court.

Lincoln in the Bardo

Lincoln in the Bardo (Random House, 2017), a surreal mix of historical fiction and fantasy. The novel opens amid a lively
discussion among the deceased, or residents of the titular bardo. The events of the novel take place in a single night.
Though this book is humorous and at times bawdy, Lincoln in the Bardo addresses the serious themes of grief and loss.
February 1862. The Civil War is less than one year old. The fighting has begun in earnest, and the nation has begun to
realize it is in for a long, bloody struggle. Meanwhile, President Lincoln’s beloved eleven-year-old son, Willie, lies upstairs
in the White House, gravely ill. In a matter of days, despite predictions of a recovery, Willie dies and is laid to rest in a
Georgetown cemetery. “My poor boy, he was too good for this earth,” the president says at the time. “God has called him
home.” Newspapers report that a grief-stricken Lincoln returned to the crypt several times alone to hold his boy’s body.
From that seed of historical truth, George Saunders spins an unforgettable story of familial love and loss that breaks free
of its realistic, historical framework into a thrilling, supernatural realm both hilarious and terrifying. Willie Lincoln finds
himself in a strange purgatory, where ghosts mingle, gripe, commiserate, quarrel, and enact bizarre acts of penance.
Within this transitional state—called, in the Tibetan tradition, the bardo—a monumental struggle erupts over young
Willie’s soul.
Lincoln in the Bardo is an astonishing feat of imagination and a bold step forward from one of the most important and
influential writers of his generation. Formally daring, generous in spirit, deeply concerned with matters of the heart, it is a
testament to fiction’s ability to speak honestly and powerfully to the things that really matter to us. Saunders has
invented a thrilling new form that deploys a kaleidoscopic, theatrical panorama of voices—living and dead, historical and
invented—to ask a timeless, profound question: How do we live and love when we know that everything we love must
end?
**Bardo- a state of existence attested to in The Tibetan Book of the Dead between death and rebirth.
Milkman
Set in Ireland during the 1970s, a period of turmoil between Ireland and Northern Ireland called the Troubles, it involves
an unnamed woman who becomes a victim of stalking. The people of her town ignore the abundant evidence that she is
being stalked, choosing, instead, to imagine that she is in a consensual relationship with her stalker—whom they know
only as “Milkman.” The novel illuminates how, in the uproar of a national schism, the basic dignity of women continued to
be casually undermined. It also explores how silence perpetuates misogyny, and how toxic institutions and norms, such as
marriage and celibacy, subjugate and simplify women and their complex stories.
The novel begins sometime in the 1970s in the midst of the Troubles. The town is frequently under siege by military
groups, which frequently destroy its infrastructure and harm, even kill, residents. The eighteen-year-old protagonist
(referred to as Young Woman) lives here with her mother and younger sisters, following her father’s death. On a
seemingly ordinary day, Young Woman realizes that Milkman (His actual job never described) is stalking her. As soon as
the Milkman’s behaviour is noticed, the townspeople victim-blame Young Woman. They scorn and mock her for joining a
relationship and, they assume, having sex before marriage. oung Woman does her best to deflect the gossip about her,
hoping that it will die down. One night just after sundown, Young Woman walks home from a French class. Milkman
approaches her, warning that if she does not stop seeing Maybe-Boyfriend, he will kill him. Young Woman is paralyzed
with terror. Luckily, the town’s actual milkman (known as Real Milkman) appears. Real Milkman is one of the only people
in the town who are nice to Young Woman.
After few weeks a mentally ill woman is found dead of an apparent murder. The townspeople quickly conclude that
Young Woman carried out the murder in revenge, using her “boyfriend” Milkman as her assassin. Young Woman can
hardly bear to go on with the torrent of rumours and blame. Young Woman and her older sister collaborate to convince
her mother to try going on a date with Real Milkman to see if the spark will ignite again. Then, news spreads that Milkman
has been murdered. No one ever finds his killer. A few days later, Young Woman is attacked in a club bathroom by
Somebody McSomebody, a young man wielding a gun, the other women inside the bathroom wrest the gun from
Somebody McSomebody and beat him up. At the end of the novel, Young Woman is ambivalent: her stalkers are gone
and her life has settled down, but she is unable to ignore the ignorance and abuse that persists around her. Milkman is an
unsparingly critical portrait of modern Ireland and its epidemics of ignorance and intolerance.

The Testaments
The Testaments is Margaret Atwood’s 2019 sequel to her dystopian novel, The Handmaid’s Tale. The Testaments is set 15
years after the events of Handmaid’s Tale. The novel chronicles resistance efforts against the ultra-religious authoritarian
nation, Gilead, through the perspectives of two teenage half-sisters and the leader of Gilead’s women’s sphere.
The Testaments begins 15 years after the conclusion of The Handmaid’s Tale, in which the Handmaid Offred escaped
Gilead with her baby, Nicole. Gileadean society continues under the oppressive thumb of the ultra-religious Commanders
and Aunts. In this society, women are treated as objects, Handmaids are used as sex slaves to produce children for
Commanders. Marthas are servants to the upper-class, Econofamilies are the impoverished lower-class, Pearl Girls are the
missionaries of Gilead, and Aunts are the religious leaders of the women’s sphere. Gilead upholds its standards using their
mercenaries, the Angels, and their spies, the Eyes.
Agnes shares her life story as the privileged daughter of a Commander in Gilead. Following the death of her adoptive
mother, Agnes’s stepmother plots to marry her off when she is barely 13. Aided by influential adults, Agnes manages to
escape marriage and enters training to be an Aunt. While in the training facility, Agnes learns that she is Offred’s daughter
and participates in a plot to overthrow Gilead.
Daisy is a teenager in Toronto, Canada, when Angels murder her adoptive parents in a car bombing. The Mayday
operatives, an anti-Gilead force, reveal that Daisy is actually Baby Nicole. With the help of Mayday’s contact, Aunt Lydia,
Nicole infiltrates Gilead as a Pearl Girl, receives information that will destroy Gilead, then smuggles it across the border
with the help of her sister, Agnes. Both girls reunite with their mother at the end of the novel.
Aunt Lydia chronicles in her memoir how she became the leader of the Aunts, and how Gilead overthrew the United
States. Balancing outer piety with manipulation, Aunt Lydia secures leadership of “the women’s sphere,” where she
gathers intel that will destroy Gilead. After giving the intel to Nicole, she takes a fatal dose of morphine before her
enemies can find her.
Using the information inside Nicole's microdot, the Canadian media leaks scandalous information about Gilead's elite,
which leads to the so-called "Ba'al Purge", causes a military putsch that brings about the collapse of Gilead and the
subsequent restoration of the United States. Agnes and Nicole are reunited with their mother, Offred. Aunt Lydia later
poisons herself as Gilead closes in on her.
The novel concludes with a metafictional epilogue, described as a partial transcript of an international historical
association conference. The events of the novel are framed by a lecture read by Professor James Darcy Pieixoto, who also
appeared in the epilogue of the Handmaid’s Tale, at the 13th Symposium on Gileadean Studies, in 2197. He questions
whether Aunt Lydia wrote the Ardua Hall Holograph. He is also curious about the identities of Agnes, Nicole, and their
Handmaid mother.

Girl, Woman, Other

There are twelve chapters in Girl, Woman, Other, each centering on one character. Mostly British and female, every
character is black. The three exceptions are one character who no longer identifies as British, another who was born
female no longer identifies as such, and one who doesn’t know she is black. Combined, these characters explore the
nature of black identity in Britain with connotations for black identity across the world.
The characters are grouped roughly into four sets of three women. Within each group, there are obvious connections
between the women. As the book progresses, it becomes clear that there are links between every character—whether it
is a social, moral, religious, or political connection. .
Evaristo said, “I wanted to put presence into absence. I was very frustrated that black British women weren’t visible in
literature. I whittled it down to 12 characters – I wanted them to span from a teenager to someone in their 90s, and see
their trajectory from birth, though not linear. There are many ways in which otherness can be interpreted in the novel –
the women are othered in so many ways and sometimes by each other. I wanted it to be identified as a novel about
women as well.”