“My name is Karim Amir, and I am an Englishman born and bred, almost.” Chapter 1: The Suburban Beginning Karim Amir, a mixed-race teenager, introduces himself and his […]
English literature
The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾
“I am an intellectual, but at the same time I am very interested in clothes and pop music.” — Adrian Mole January Adrian Mole, a self-proclaimed intellectual, begins […]
English literature
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
“Prime numbers are what is left when you have taken all the patterns away. I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could […]
English literature
The Light Between Oceans
“You only have to forgive once. To resent, you have to do it all day, every day.” Part One The novel opens with Tom Sherbourne, a World War […]
English literature
The Mirror and the Light
“The fate of peoples is made like this, two men in small rooms. Forget the coronations, the conclaves of cardinals, the pomp and processions. This is how the […]
English literature
Bring Up the Bodies
“The dead are unseeing, unhearing. The dead are not our business. They cannot be reached, they cannot be touched, they cannot be spoken to.” Part One: Falconry Thomas […]
English literature
Wolf Hall
“Lock Cromwell in a deep dungeon in the morning, and when you come back that night he’ll be sitting on a plush cushion eating larks’ tongues, and all […]
English literature
The Stranger’s Child
“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” Part One: Two Acres (1913) The novel opens in 1913 at the affluent Stanmore household, “Two Acres,” […]
English literature
The Line of Beauty
“It was a summer of strangers, a summer of departures.” Chapter 1: 1983 The novel opens in the summer of 1983, introducing Nick Guest, a young gay man […]
English literature
Swing Time
“It was the first time I had understood how a thing can seem to be one thing but also another, how a single surface can be divided, like […]