High School Recommended Reading List: Fiction

Traces the growing friction between village leaders and Europeans determined to save the heathen souls of Africa. But its hero, a noble man who is driven by destructive forces, speaks a universal tongue.

Seventeen-year-old Elio, anticipating a boring summer at his parents' home on the Italian coast, finds himself powerfully attracted to Oliver, a handsome young American who has come to assist Elio's father for the summer, and the two young men soon fall into a romantic and sexual relationship that influences the course of their lives.

Set in Nigeria during the 1960s, this novel contains three main characters who get swept up in the violence during these turbulent years. It is about Africa, about the end of colonialism, about class and race, and the ways in which love can complicate these things.

What if the power to hurt were in women's hands? Suddenly - tomorrow or the day after - teenage girls find that with a flick of their fingers, they can inflict agonising pain and even death. With this single twist, the four lives at the heart of Naomi Alderman's extraordinary, visceral novel are utterly transformed.

Spanning four generations, Isabel Allende's family saga is populated by a memorable, often eccentric, cast of characters. Together, men and women, spirits, the forces of nature and of history, converge in a brilliantly realised novel.

When jobs typically done by humans are replaced with alien technology, Adam's parents have no money for food, clean water, or medicine, forcing Adam and his girlfriend Chloe to get creative.

Hag-Seed tells the story of Felix, a theatre director ousted from his job at a Canadian theatre festival, who begins teaching Shakespeare at a prison and plots his revenge against the men who betrayed him while staging a production of The Tempest.

Set in the near future, America has become a puritanical theocracy and Offred tells her story as a Handmaid under the new social order.

Jimmy, perhaps the last living human unaltered by science, struggles for survival in a post-apocalyptic world as he tries to make sense of how everything went wrong, mourns the loss of his beloved Oryx, a girl he met through a kiddie porn Web site, and considers the role of his genius friend Crake who had been working on a formula for immortality at the RejoovenEsenseCompound.

In early nineteenth-century England, a spirited young woman copes with the courtship of a snobbish gentleman as well as the romantic entanglements of her four sisters.

Anderson Lake, an employee of AgriGen, works undercover while searching for food items thought to be extinct, and when he meets Emiko, a strange, engineered being, the two work together to survive and find meaning in a decaying world

An extraordinary novel about a group of refugees who survive a perilous ocean voyage only to face the threat of deportation amid accusations of terrorism.

Fictionalized account of Dr. William Rivers who pioneered treatment of shell-shocked soldiers during World War I, who tries to reconcile his work with the knowledge that the men he treats will be returning to battle.

Daunis, who is part Ojibwe, defers attending the University of Michigan to care for her mother and reluctantly becomes involved in the investigation of a series of drug-related deaths.

This hauntingly prophetic novel centres around a not-too-distant future where happiness is allocated on a TV screen, individuals and scholars are outcasts and books are burned by a special task force of firemen.

The first Earth people to attempt the colonization of Mars try to build their new world in the image of the civilization they left behind.

In 19th century Yorkshire, the passionate attachment between a headstrong young girl and a foundling boy brought up by her father causes disaster for them and many others, even in the next generation.

Follows ten-year-old Zimbabwe native, Darling, as she escapes the closed schools and paramilitary police control of her homeland in search of opportunity and freedom with an aunt in America.

A young African-American woman is mysteriously transferred back in time leading to an irresistible curiosity about her family's past.

Two novels, six short stories, and a pair of essays in a single volume. In both his essays and his fiction, Albert Camus (19131́960) de-ployed his lyric eloquence in defense against despair, providing an affirmation of the brave assertion of humanity in the face of a universe devoid of order or meaning.

A fictionalized account of the history of the Kelly gang, which traces the adventures of Australian outlaw Ned Kelly.

A collection of seven short science fiction stories, several of which have been made into films, e.g., “The Story of Your Life” was made into the movie “Arrival.”

Edna Pontellier, a Victorian-era wife and mother, is awakened to the full force of her desire for love and freedom when she becomes enamored with Robert LeBrun, a young man she meets while on vacation.

A young girl living in a Hispanic neighborhood in Chicago ponders the advantages and disadvantages of her environment and evaluates her relationships with family and friends.

A confrontation between a sixteen-year-old Nigerian orphan, called Little Bee, and a wealthy British couple on vacation, has life-changing consequences for everyone involved.

A diamond of yellow hue is stolen from a shrine in India. Years later, unknowingly, the diamond is given to Rachel Verrinder as a birthday gift. The diamond carries a terrible curse and is stolen on the eve of Rachel's birthday.

Laura travels the world before returning to Sydney, where she works for a publisher of travel guides. Ravi dreams of being a tourist until he is driven from Sri Lanka by devastating events. An enthralling array of people, places, and stories surround these superbly drawn characters.

While exploring the facets of romance with her Nepali tutor, the Indian-Nepali insurgency reaches a frenzy, forcing Sai to revisit her past and reconnect with her eccentric grandfather.

Living with an old-world mother and rebellious sister, an urban New Jersey misfit dreams of becoming the next J. R. R. Tolkien and believes that a long-standing family curse is thwarting his efforts to find love and happiness.

A blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II.

Five-year-old Jack has spent his life living in an eleven-by-eleven foot space his mother calls Room and while Jack uses his imagination to create wondrous fantasies to entertain himself, his mother dreads the day her son begins to question why they must remain in Room and tries to find a way to escape.

Dumas's tale of swashbuckling and heroism follows the fortunes of d'Artagnan, a headstrong country boy who travels to Paris to join the Musketeers - the bodyguard of King Louis XIII. Here he falls in with Athos, Porthos and Aramis, and the four friends soon find themselves caught up in court politics and intrigue.

When two English brothers take the helm of a Barbados sugar plantation, nervousness and fear run high. Washington Black - an eleven year-old field slave who has known no other life - is aghast to find himself selected as personal servant to one of these men. His new master is the eccentric Christopher Wilde - naturalist, explorer, scientist, inventor and abolitionist - whose single-minded pursuit of the perfect aerial machine mystifies all around him.

Bennie Salazar, who put aside his days as a punk rocker to be a record executive, reminisces about his younger years and how his adulthood came to be while he remains naive to the inner workings of Sasha, the mid-thirties woman who works with Bennie and harbors a penchant for stealing

Mae Holland is thrilled to be working for the most powerful internet company, but as her life beyond the company campus grows distant, a strange encounter with a colleague leaves her shaken and her role in the Circle becomes increasingly public.

The invisible man is the unnamed narrator of this impassioned novel of black lives in 1940s America. Embittered by a country which treats him as a non-being, he retreats to an underground cell.

The members of a genteel southern family are portrayed as petty failures, drunkards, suicides, pathological perverts, and idiots.

In a house on a suburban street in Nagasaki, meteorologist Shimura Kobo lives quietly on his own. Or so he believes. Food begins to go missing. Perturbed by this threat to his orderly life, Shimura sets up a webcame to monitor his home. But though eager to identify his intruder, is Shimura really prepared for what the camera will reveal?

A novel of love and war that traces the life of one man--an Australian surgeon--from a prisoner-of-war camp on the Thai-Burma Death Railway during World War II, up to the present.

Follows nine-year-old Oskar Schell as he encounters a number of interesting characters in his search for information about his father, who died in the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, and tries to find the lock that fits the mysterious key he left behind.

Under the streets of London lies a world most people could never dream of. When Richard Mayhew helps a mysterious girl he finds bleeding on the pavement, his boring life changes in an instant. Her name is Door, she’s on the run from two assassins in black suits and she comes from London Below. His act of kindness leads him to a place filled with monsters and angels, a Beast in a labyrinth and an Earl who holds Court in a Tube train. It is strangely familiar yet utterly bizarre.

It began for our narrator forty years ago when the family lodger stole their car and committed suicide in it, stirring up ancient powers best left undisturbed. Dark creatures from beyond the world are on the loose, and it will take everything our narrator has just to stay alive: there is primal horror here, and menace unleashed. His only defense is three women, on a farm at the end of the lane. The youngest of them claims that her duckpond is ocean. The oldest can remember the Big Bang.

A family saga set against the backdrop of Burma, India, and Malaya's nineteenth- and twentieth-century history, beginning when the British invasion of 1885 separates a poor boy named Rajkumar from his love, Dolly, a handmaiden for the royal family, which the invasion forces into exile.

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Preparing to fight China's nineteenth-century Opium Wars, a motley assortment of sailors and passengers establish family-like ties that eventually span continents, races, and generations.

Nitta Sayuri, a young Japanese woman who was taken from her home at the age of nine and sold into slavery as a geisha, discovers a rare opportunity for freedom when the outbreak of World War II forces an end to the only life she has ever known.

In a country teetering on the brink of civil war, two young people meet--sensual, fiercely independent Nadia and gentle, restrained Saeed. They embark on a furtive love affair, thrust into premature intimacy by the unrest roiling their city. When it explodes, turning familiar streets into a patchwork of checkpoints and bomb blasts, they begin to hear whispers about doors--doors that can whisk people far away, if perilously and for a price. As violence and the threat of violence escalate, Nadia and Saeed decide that they no longer have a choice. They find a door and step through.

Follows the life of an impoverished rural boy as he grows up to become a corporate tycoon.

The story of a young prince, Paul Artreides, scion of a star-crossed dynasty, and of his journey from boy to warrior to ruler of a dying planet destined to become a paradise regained.

Originally published in German.
In postwar Germany, a fifty-year-old man regards himself as a dual personality, half man and half wolf.

Eleanor Oliphant leads a simple life. She wears the same clothes to work every day, eats the same meal deal for lunch every day and buys the same two bottles of vodka to drink every weekend. Eleanor Oliphant is happy. Nothing is missing from her carefully timetabled life. Except, sometimes, everything. One simple act of kindness is about to shatter the walls Eleanor has built around herself. Now she must learn how to navigate the world that everyone else seems to take for granted - while searching for the courage to face the dark corners she's avoided all her life.

Amir, haunted by his betrayal of Hassan, the son of his father's servant and a childhood friend, returns to Kabul as an adult after he learns Hassan has been killed, in an attempt to redeem himself by rescuing Hassan's son from a life of slavery to a Taliban official.

An African-American woman searches for a fulfilling relationship through two loveless marriages and finally finds it in the person of Tea Cake, an itinerant laborer and gambler.

This story tells how the courage of one girl in standing against the tide of tradition enables her Maori tribe to become reconnected with their ancestral life force.

A couple set off across a troubled land of mist and rain in the hope of finding a son they have not seen in years.

Kathy, Ruth and Tommy were pupils at Hailsham - an idyllic establishment situated deep in the English countryside. The children there were tenderly sheltered from the outside world, brought up to believe they were special, and that their personal welfare was crucial. But for what reason were they really there?

The quiet, isolated life of the Blackwoods--eighteen-year-old Merricat; her older sister, Constance, who may have poisoned their parents six years ago; and their wheelchair-bound uncle--is disrupted by the arrival of a cousin pursuing the family fortune.

From the acclaimed writer of The Book of Night Women comes a masterful novel framed as a fictional oral history that explores the events and characters surrounding the attempted assassination of Bob Marley during the political turmoil on Jamaica in the late 1970s.

Son of an influential father, Pak Jun Do rises through the ranks in North Korea to a life of espionage, kidnapping, and torture, and eventually falls for the dictator's favorite actress.

In the summer of 2011, just after Nour loses her father to cancer, her mother moves Nour and her sisters from New York City back to Syria to be closer to their family. In order to keep her father's spirit as she adjusts to her new home, Nour tells herself their favorite story--the tale of Rawiya, a twelfth-century girl who disguised herself as a boy in order to apprentice herself to a famous mapmaker. But the Syria Nour's parents knew is changing, and it isn't long before the war reaches their quiet Homs neighborhood. When a stray shell destroys Nour's house and almost takes her life, she and her family are forced to choose: stay and risk more violence or flee across seven countries of the Middle East and North Africa in search of safety--along the very route Rawiya and her mapmaker took eight hundred years before in their quest to chart the world.

“The Metamorphosis” is an allegorical story about a man who awakens one morning to find himself changed into a large insect.

Yeong-hye begins having nightmares about blood and brutality and decides to become a vegetarian but this act of independence upsets the balance of her marriage.

Told in two voices, Pen, whose dream of taking over her family's restaurant has been destroyed, and Xander, a new, undocumented, employee seeking his father, form a bond.

A rebel named Randle Patrick McMurphy is committed to a mental ward and challenges the authority of its dictatorial head nurse.

Charlie Gordon, born with an unusually low IQ, must face his gradual return to his former state when the astounding results of an experimental surgery that increased his intelligence prove to be only temporary.

Only a generation removed from being simple Pennsylvania potato farmers, Gottfried and Marla Hemmings managed to trade digging spuds for developing subdivisions and now sit atop a seven-figure bank account, wealth they've declined to pass on to their adult children or their teenage grand children. Now the five teenagers are lost in a tangled maze of family secrets. One of the teens sells pot; one has cancer; all are estranged from the family. As they come together for Easter dinner, will they be able to find their ways back to each other?

Tomas, a hopeless philanderer and successful surgeon, flees Prague when the Russians invade in 1968 and heads for Switzerland where he must provide for himself and his lover by working as a window washer.

Subhash, having left his family in Calcutta to pursue a career in science in the United States, returns home to look into what happened to his brother, Udayan, who had joined the Naxalite Movement, to try to rebuild his shattered family, and to help his brother's wife.

In the aftermath of the Haitian earthquake, Shorty, a poor, fifteen-year-old gang member from the slums of Site Soleil, is trapped in the rubble of a hospital and as he grows weaker, he has visions and memories of his life of violence, his lost twin sister, and of Toussaint L'Ouverture, who liberated Haiti from French rule in 1804.

An official from an interplanetary federation is called in to arbitrate peace on a planet whose inhabitants are technically advanced, androgynous, and have telepathic powers.

Follows one Korean family through the generations, beginning in early 1900s Korea with Sunja, the prized daughter of a poor yet proud family, whose unplanned pregnancy threatens to shame them all. Deserted by her lover, Sunja is saved when a young tubercular minister offers to marry and bring her to Japan. So begins a sweeping saga of an exceptional family in exile from its homeland and caught in the indifferent arc of history. Through desperate struggles and hard-won triumphs, its members are bound together by deep roots as they face enduring questions of faith, family, and identity.

A award-winning collection of science fiction and fantasy stories, featured on the NetFlix show, Love, Death and Robots.

Elphaba, born with emerald green skin, comes of age in the land of Oz, rooming with debutante Glinda at the university, and following a path in life that earns her the label of Wicked.

A thirteen-year-old cabin boy, Gemmy Fairley, is cast ashore from a British shipwreck onto the Queensland coast, and is taken in by Australian aborigines in the mid-1840s.

In a future in which a pandemic has left few survivors, actress Kirsten Raymonde, having witnessed paparazzo-turned-EMT Jeevan Chaudhary try to save the life of actor Arthur Leander after he suffered a heart attack on stage, travels with a troupe performing Shakespeare and finds herself in a community in which a prophet will not let anyone leave alive. Includes subplots about Jeevan as he watches the world change from the pandemic and Arthur before his death.

Henry VIII, anxious about the consequences of dying without a male heir, is denied permission to annul his marriage of twenty years and marry Anne Boleyn, but the power struggle between the Church and the Crown is mediated by astute politician Thomas Cromwell, who manages to get the king what he wants while keeping his eye on the prize of a free England.

Possessing encyclopedia-like intelligence, unusual zookeeper's son Pi Patel sets sail for America, but when the ship sinks, he escapes on a life boat and is lost at sea with a dwindling number of animals until only he and a hungry Bengal tiger remain.

Traces the journey of a father and his son as they walk alone after a great fire has consumed the nation and left everything in ashes.

Imaginative thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis, misinterpreting a scene between her older sister Cecilia and Robbie Turner, the housekeeper's son, later accuses Robbie of a crime she has no proof he committed and spends years trying to atone for her actions.

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A portrait of India featuring four characters. Two are tailors who are forcibly sterilized, one is a student who emigrates, and the fourth is a widowed seamstress who decides to hang on. A tale of cruelty, political thuggery and despair by an Indian from Toronto.

A circus known as Le Cirque des Rêves features two illusionists, Celia and Marco, who are unknowingly competing in a game to which they have been irrevocably bound by their mercurial masters, and as the two fall deeply and passionately in love with each other, their masters intervene with dangerous consequences.

It's the mid-1800s. At Sweet Home in Kentucky, an era is ending as slavery comes under attack from the abolitionists. The worlds of Halle and Paul D. are to be destroyed in a cataclysm of agony and torment. The world of Sethe is to turn to violence and death.

Presents a collection of fourteen short stories by Alice Munro that deal with the moment a life is forever altered.

Okada is apparently a happy man - his domestic life seems familiar and comfortable, but admittedly he has just quit his job, the cat has disappeared and a strange woman is bothering him with explicit phone calls.

Duncan, chief of police, is idealistic and visionary, a dream to the townspeople but a nightmare for criminals. The drug trade is ruled by two drug lords, one of whom--a master of manipulation named Hecate--has connections with the highest in power, and plans to use them to get his way.

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The daughter of a Chinese American family is found dead, turning the family's lives upside down.

A collection of short stories about Vietnamese immigrants to the United States.

Follows a Viet Cong agent as he spies on a South Vietnamese army general and his compatriots as they start a new life in 1975 Los Angeles.

Forced to relive his life over and over again, Harry August receives a message on his eleventh death bed from a little girl who tells him that the world is about to end, and it is up to him to stop it.

When a woman unexpectedly loses her lifelong best friend and mentor, she finds herself burdened with the unwanted dog he has left behind. Her own battle against grief is intensified by the mute suffering of the dog, a huge Great Dane traumatised by the inexplicable disappearance of its master, and by the threat of eviction: dogs are prohibited in her apartment building. While others worry that grief has made her a victim of magical thinking, the woman refuses to be separated from the dog except for brief periods of time. Isolated from the rest of the world, increasingly obsessed with the dog's care, determined to read its mind and fathom its heart, she comes dangerously close to unraveling. But while troubles abound, rich and surprising rewards lie in store for both of them. Elegiac and searching, The Friend is both a meditation on loss and a celebration of human-canine devotion.

Portrays life in a future time when a totalitarian government watches over all citizens and directs all activities.

An insomniac, unhappy with his life, befriends a soap salesman who starts clubs designed to help its members relieve frustration by beating each other up; and, as the clubs begin springing up around the nation, the salesman's appetite for violence increases.

Dr. Marina Singh, a research scientist with a Minnesota-based pharmaceutical company, is sent to Brazil after the death of her friend and colleague, to take up his mission of finding Dr.Annick Swenson, a ruthless woman, now in her seventies, who has been conducting research among the Lakashi tribe on a reputed miracle drug, and refuses to let anything stand in her way.

An autobiographical novel which chronicles the mental breakdown of Esther Greenwood, a gifted young woman working for the summer as a junior editor at a New York magazine in the early 1950s.

This story is told by a young soldier in the trenches of Flanders during the First World War. Through his eyes we see the realities of war. Incidents are vividly described, but there is no sense of adventure, only the feeling of youth betrayed.

Haunting illustrations are woven throughout these horror stories that follow one extended Cherokee family across the centuries and well into the future as they encounter predators of all kinds in each time period.

In a graveyard outside the walls of Old Delhi, a resident unrolls a threadbare Persian carpet. On a concrete sidewalk, a baby suddenly appears, just after midnight. In a snowy valley, a bereaved father writes a letter to his five-year-old daughter about the people who came to her funeral. In a second-floor apartment, a lone woman chain-smokes as she reads through her old notebooks. At the Jannat Guest House, two people who have known each other all their lives sleep with their arms wrapped around each other, as though they have just met.

An adolescent boy, knowing he is about to be dropped by his school, spends three days and nights in New York City.

The suspenseful and heartbreaking story of a family ripped apart by secrets and driven to pit love against loyalty, with devastating consequences. The novel reimagines Sophocles's Antigone in a contemporary setting.

Fusing Keatsian mists and mellow fruitfulness with the vitality, the immediacy and the colour-hit of Pop Art - via a bit of very contemporary skulduggery and skull-diggery - 'Autumn' is a witty excavation of the present by the past. The novel is a stripped-branches take on popular culture, and a meditation, in a world growing ever more bordered and exclusive, on what richness and worth are, what harvest means.

Two African-American friends dream of becoming dancers, but only one has the talent to make it, as the futures of both women move from London to West Africa.

Tom is a World War I veteran who maintains a lighthouse off the shore of Australia with his wife Isabel, a woman desperate to have a baby. Her prayers are answered when an infant washes up on shore in a rowboat. Tom thinks they should notify the authorities but ultimately gives in to Isabel's wish to keep the girl. Fate strikes again when the couple meet the child's biological mother on the mainland. Now, Tom and Isabel must make a decision that will forever affect the lives of four people.

Two drifters, George and Lennie, see their dreams of buying their own farm come to a tragic end when Lennie, a simple-minded man, accidentally commits a crime.

Hiro Protagonist, a pizza delivery man in future America, lives an alternate life as a warrior prince in the Metaverse where he embarks on a search-and-destroy mission for the virtual-reality villain who is trying to bring about infocalypse.

Skeeter returns home to Mississippi from college in 1962 and begins to write stories about the African-American women that are found working in white households, which includes Aibileen, who grieves for the loss of her son while caring for her seventeenth white child, and Minny, Aibileen's sassy friend, the hired cook for a secretive woman who is new to town.

A collection of thirteen linked short stories recounting the experiences of Olive Kitteridge, a retired schoolteacher who witnesses the changes in her town and the world at large.

The personal, often painful, histories of four Chinese American women who began meeting in San Francisco in 1949 to play mah jong are revealed as the daughter of one who has died searches for her sisters in China to tell them about the mother they never knew.

A family of two generations in China who lived through Mao's cultural revolution piece together their fractured family in present-day Vancouver.

In 1922 Count Rostov is deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal. He is sentenced to house arrest in The Metropol, a grand hotel across the street from the Kremlin. Rostov, an indomitable man of erudition and wit, has never worked a day in his life, and must now live in an attic room while some of the most tumultuous decades in Russian history are unfolding outside the hotel's doors. Unexpectedly, his reduced circumstances provide him a doorway into a much larger world of emotional discovery.

William Kemp owns a slave ship, his nephew and son serve aboard the ship, the crew and human cargo are stranded on the coast of Florida.

Describes a future America in which computers solve all your problems, machines give you everything you need, and you are taken care of from cradle to grave by an industrial society.

A fourth-generation German-American is tortured by his memories of the firebombing of Dresden in 1944 which he witnessed while a prisoner or war.

Pregnant fifteen-year-old Esch and her family live in Bois Sauvage, Mississippi, which puts them in the path of Hurricane Katrina, and as they try to stock the small amount of food they have in preparation for the disaster, the family's love for each other will be their only hope for survival.

Sixteen-year-old trans boy Benji is on the run from the cult that raised him-the fundamentalist sect that unleashed Armageddon and decimated the world's population.

In an unnamed Middle Eastern security state, a young Arab-Indian hacker shields his clients, dissidents, outlaws, Islamists, and other watched groups, from surveillance and tries to stay out of trouble. He goes by Alif, the first letter of the Arabic alphabet, and a convenient handle to hide behind. The aristocratic woman Alif loves has jilted him for a prince chosen by her parents, and his computer has just been breached by the State's electronic security force, putting his clients and his own neck on the line. Then it turns out his lover's new fianceé is the head of State security, and his henchmen come after Alif, driving him underground. When Alif discovers The Thousand and One Days, the secret book of the jinn, which both he and the Hand suspect may unleash a new level of information technology, the stakes are raised and Alif must struggle for life or death, aided by forces seen and unseen.

Yevgeny Zamyatin's We is a powerfully inventive vision that has influenced writers from George Orwell to Ayn Rand. In a glass-enclosed city of absolute straight lines, ruled over by the all-powerful 'Benefactor', the citizens of the totalitarian society of OneState live out lives devoid of passion and creativity - until D-503, a mathematician who dreams in numbers, makes a discovery: he has an individual soul.