Our summer '21 reading list: Senior School edition

Continuing on with our summer reading list, Mrs Jacobi offers her selection of books for our Senior School pupils, Leavers and parents. From pandemic histories to classic romances, there is plenty in here to make sure you have a stimulating summer holiday filled with lots to read!

David Storm's father doesn't approve of Angus Morton's unusually large horses, calling them blasphemies against nature. Little does he realise that his own son,  his son's cousin Rosalind and their friends have their own secret aberration which would label them as mutants. But as David and Rosalind grow older it becomes more difficult to conceal their differences from the village elders. Soon they face a choice: wait for eventual discovery, or flee to the terrifying and mutable Badlands.

From the moment 15-year-old Amelia begins work on the checkout at Woolworths she is sunk, gone, lost...head-over-heels in love with Chris. Chris is the funny, charming, man-about-Woolies, but he is 21, and the six-year difference in their ages may as well be 100. Chris and Amelia talk about everything from second-wave feminism to Great Expectations and Alien but will he ever look at her in the way she wants him to? And if he does, will it be everything she hopes?

A teenager wakes up in hospital to find that she can't remember the last three and a half years of her life. But it is not all bad, because this gives her the chance to reinvent herself. After all, who is to say that everything has to be the same?

Orphaned as a child, Jane has felt an outcast her whole young life. Her courage is tested once again when she arrives at Thornfield Hall, where she has been hired by the brooding, proud Edward Rochester to care for his ward Adèle. Jane finds herself drawn to his troubled yet kind spirit. She falls in love. Hard. But there is a terrifying secret inside the gloomy, forbidding Thornfield Hall. Is Rochester hiding from Jane? Will Jane be left heartbroken and exiled once again?

While the Titanic and Lusitania are both well-documented disasters, the single greatest tragedy in maritime history is the little-known 30 January 1945 sinking in the Baltic Sea by a Soviet submarine of the Wilhelm Gustloff, a German cruise liner that was supposed to ferry wartime personnel and refugees to safety from the advancing Red Army. The ship was overcrowded with more than 10,500 passengers — the intended capacity was approximately 1,800 — and more than 9,000 people, including 5,000 children, lost their lives.
 

Welcome to Coronation Road, a kaleidoscope of clashing cultures and parallel lives. There is Maggie and her politician mum in their big house. There is Tokes and his mum in a tiny bedsit, running from trouble. And there is the ruthless Starfish gang, breeding fear through the neighbourhood.

Set in England and Hong Kong in the 1920s, The Painted Veil is the story of the beautiful, but love-starved Kitty Fane. When her husband discovers her adulterous affair, he forces her to accompany him to the heart of a cholera epidemic. Stripped of the British society of her youth and the small but effective society she fought so hard to attain in Hong Kong, she is compelled by her awakening conscience to reassess her life and learn how to love.

In an Ireland doubly ravaged by war and disease, nurse Julia Power works at an understaffed hospital in the city centre, where expectant mothers who have come down with the terrible new flu are quarantined together. Into Julia's regimented world step two outsiders—Doctor Kathleen Lynn, a rumoured rebel on the run from the police, and a young volunteer helper, Bridie Sweeney.

In the darkness and intensity of this tiny ward, over three days, these women change each other's lives in unexpected ways. They lose patients to this baffling pandemic, but they also shepherd new life into a fearful world. With tireless tenderness and humanity, carers and mothers alike somehow do their impossible work.
 

Part adventure-yarn, part moral allegory, this enchanting novel tells the story of one boy’s inspiring quest of self-discovery as he seeks the answer to one of life’s most profound questions: What is the meaning of life? When a mysterious traveler leaves him a map to the location of an ancient mountain, Hugo Driscoll goes in search of the wise man that lives near its peak and who is said to hold the secret to a life of happiness. But what he discovers are unexpected treasures he could never have imagined.
 

Paulo Coelho's masterpiece tells the mystical story of Santiago, an Andalusian shepherd boy who yearns to travel in search of a worldly treasure. His quest will lead him to riches far different, and far more satisfying, listening to our hearts, of recognizing opportunity and learning to read the omens strewn along life's path, and, most importantly, to follow our dreams.

A sweeping historical novel about a dancehall girl and an orphan boy whose fates entangle over an old Chinese superstition about men who turn into tigers. When 11-year-old Ren's master dies, he makes one last request of his Chinese houseboy: that Ren find his severed finger, lost years ago in an accident, and reunite it with his body. Ren has 49 days, or else his master's soul will roam the earth, unable to rest in peace.

The Fall of the Pagoda, the first of two semi-autobiographical novels written originally by Eileen Chang in English, depicts in gripping detail her childhood years in Tianjin and Shanghai. The story introduces a young girl called Lute growing up amid many family entanglements with her divorced mother and spinster aunt during the 1930s in Shanghai’s International Settlement. Both novels shed light on the construction of selfhood in Chang’s other novels, through lengthy discussions of Chang’s difficult relationship with her selfishly demanding mother as well as of intricate dynamics in the extended families who emerged from aristocratic households of the late Qing Dynasty.

In the 23rd century, Zoe, a historian, discovers the diaries that a middle-class architect, Harry Roberts, wrote in 2016 and decides to recreate his life. Harry, an ardent remainer, meets Michelle by chance. Like most people she knows, Michelle voted leave. The two are drawn to each other despite their differences and begin a relationship. Writing in a bleaker, climate-ravaged future, from which the political concerns of the today seem very remote, Zoe turns this personal story into a reflection on the divisions we face, the ideologies we prioritize and asks, "What next?"

Ball Lightning is a fast-paced story of what happens when the beauty of scientific inquiry runs up against a push to harness new discoveries with no consideration of their possible consequences. When Chen’s parents are incinerated before his eyes by a blast of ball lightning, he devotes his life to cracking the secret of mysterious natural phenomena. His search takes him to stormy mountaintops, an experimental military weapons lab and an old Soviet science station. 

From the author of Brothers and China in Ten Words this celebrated contemporary classic of Chinese literature was also adapted for film by Zhang Yimou. This searing novel tells a story of transformation from the spoiled son of a landlord to a kindhearted peasant. After squandering his family's fortune in gambling dens and brothels, the young, deeply penitent Fugui settles down to do the honest work of a farmer. Forced by the Nationalist Army to leave behind his family, he witnesses the horrors and privations of the Civil War, only to return years later to face a string of hardships brought on by the the Cultural Revolution. Left with an ox as the companion of his final years, Fugui stands as a model of gritty authenticity, buoyed by his appreciation for life in this narrative of humbling power.

Returning to work following an accident, Detective Inspector Ray Patrick refuses to disclose that he now lives with face blindness — an inability to recognise faces. As Ray deceives his team, he is pulled into a police operation that targets an international trade in human organs. And when he attempts to bring the organisation down, Ray is witness to a savage murder.

Windows on the World debuted at number two on the French national bestseller list and won the prestigious Prix Interalli prize in 2003. Now available in paperback, this unprecedented novel will once again astonish, provoke and embrace the reader as it attempts to penetrate the unspeakable. Windows on the World unflinchingly imagines the moments from 8:30 to 10:28 am inside the World Trade Center on September 11. Weaving together philosophy, myth, world politics and humour, Beigbeder creates a tapestry of fury and wonder, a tribute to thousands of unsung heroes.

After the days of the plague came the dreams, dark dreams that warned of the coming of the Dark Man — the apostate of death, his worn-down boot heels tramping the night roads, the warlord of the charnel house and Prince of Evil. His time is at hand. His empire grows in the west and the Apocalypse looms...

The Great Influenza

John M Barry

The Great Influenza is ultimately a tale of triumph amid tragedy, which provides us with a precise and sobering model as we confront the epidemics looming on our own horizon. John M Barry has written a new afterword for this edition that brings us up to speed on the terrible threat of the avian flu and suggest ways in which we might head off another flu pandemic.

The GCHQ Puzzle Book

Penguin Books

Whether they are recruiting new staff or challenging each other to the toughest Christmas quizzes and treasure hunts imaginable, puzzles are at the heart of what GCHQ does. Now they're opening up their archives of decades' worth of codes, puzzles and challenges for everyone to try.

In this book you will find:
- Tips on how to get into the mindset of a codebreaker
- Puzzles ranging in difficulty from easy to brain-bending
- A competition section where you search for Britain's smartest puzzler

Stranger Than We Can Imagine: Making Sense of the Twentieth Century  John Higgs

In this brilliantly written and original book, John Higgs explores with great clarity and wit the extremes of twentieth century thought. In doing so, he shows how a world of empires became a world of individuals. You will never see the twentieth century in the same way again.
 

Into Thin Air

Jon Krakauer

A bank of clouds was assembling on the not-so-distant horizon, but journalist-mountaineer Jon Krakauer, standing on the summit of Mt Everest, saw nothing that "suggested that a murderous storm was bearing down." He was wrong. The storm, which claimed five lives and left countless more — including Krakauer's — in guilt-ridden disarray, would also provide the impetus for Into Thin Air, Krakauer's epic account of the May 1996 disaster.

Unselfie: Why Empathetic Kids Succeed in Our All-About-Me World

Michele Borba

Teens today are 40 percent less empathetic than they were 30 years ago. Why is a lack of empathy — which goes hand-in-hand with the self-absorption epidemic Dr Michele Borba calls the Selfie Syndrome — so dangerous? First, it hurts children's academic performance and leads to bullying behaviours. Also, it correlates with more cheating and less resilience. Once children grow up, a lack of empathy hampers their ability to collaborate, innovate, and solve problems — all must-have skills for the global economy.