Why the Child is Cooking in the Polenta

Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood

Marjane Satrapi · 160 pages

Wise, funny, and heartbreaking, Persepolis is Marjane Satrapi’s memoir of growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution. In powerful black-and-white comic strip images, Satrapi tells the story of her life in Tehran from ages six to fourteen, years that saw the overthrow of the Shah’s regime, the triumph of the Islamic Revolution, and the devastating effects of war with Iraq. The intelligent and

One of the Boys

Daniel Magariel · 172 pages

"A riveting and emotionally harrowing debut about two young brothers and their physically and psychologically abusive father--One of the Boys is 160 perfect, stunning pages by a major new talent. The three of them--a twelve-year-old boy, his older brother, their father--have won the war: the father's term for his bitter divorce and custody battle. They leave their Kansas home and drive through the

Gem Squash Tokoloshe

Rachel Zadok · 327 pages

When the rain stops, Faith's father takes to the road as a travelling salesman, leaving Faith and her mother, Bella, alone on their drought-stricken farm in the Northern Transvaal. Together, they keenly await his weekend visits, until one day he stops coming altogether and Bella's health begins to decline. Fifteen years later, Bella has died, incarcerated in the Sterkfontein asylum for the crimina

More

Hakan Gunday · 398 pages

"The award-winning More, by one of Turkey's leading underground writers, is the world's first novel about the refugee crisis. "The illegals climbed into the truck, and, after a journey of two hundred miles, they boarded ships and were lost in the night." Gaza lives on the shores of the Aegean Sea. At the age of nine he becomes a human trafficker, like his father. Together with his father and local

Little Jewel

Patrick Modiano · 176 pages

Bastard Out of Carolina

Dorothy Allison · 309 pages

Bone, an illegitimate child in a family of social outcasts, sees her mother's happiness with her new husband and will not tell when the stepfather begins abusing her in the 1950s.

Foster

Claire Keegan · 108 pages

A small girl is sent to live with foster parents on a farm in rural Ireland, without knowing when she will return home. In the strangers' house she finds affection she has not known before, and slowly she begins to blossom in their care. But when a secret is suddenly revealed, she realizes how fragile her idyll is.

Diamond

Jacqueline Wilson · 294 pages

Diamond wasn't always a star. Born to penniless parents who longed for a strong, healthy son, she was a dainty, delicate daughter and a bitter disappointment. Discovering an extraordinary gift for acrobatics, Diamond uses her talent to earn a few pennies, but brings shame on her family. When a mysterious, cruel-eyed stranger spots her performing, Diamond is sold and is taken to become an acrobat a

We Need New Names

NoViolet Bulawayo · 304 pages

Whenever foreigners visit Paradise they always ask Darling and her friends to smile for the camera. Here are some of the things Darling and her friends have to smile about: stealing guavas, gifts from NGOs, singing Lady Gaga at the tops of their voices. But they all want to go to the real paradise in America or Britain.

Ellen Foster

Kaye Gibbons · 126 pages

Having suffered abuse and misfortune for much of her life, a young child searches for a better life and finally gets a break in the home of a loving woman with several foster children.

The Night Rainbow

Claire King · 263 pages

It is summer in the south of France, and Pea and her little sister Margot spend their days inventing games in the meadow behind their house. Their father has died in an accident, and their mother has just lost a baby. Maman is English, already isolated in this small, foreign village, and in her compounded grief, she has retreated even further. Pea and Margot can't make Maman happy again. When Pea

A Book of Common Prayer

Joan Didion · 272 pages

Floating in My Mother's Palm

Ursula Hegi · 187 pages

"From an award winning author comes a deeply personal and powerful account of Hanna Malter, a young girl growing up in a small town in Germany in the 1950s. Hanna conjours up unforgettably the events of her youth: her magical bond to her unconventional mother; her friendship with an illegitmate son of an American GI; and the lessons in local lore that are served with tea and innuendo by the town's

Loving Sabotage

Amelie Nothomb · 140 pages

""I lived everything during these three years: heroism, glory, treachery, love, indifference, suffering, humiliation. It was China, I was seven years old."". "So announces the narrator of Loving Sabotage, Amelie Nothomb's novel about a young girl who seems already stripped of illusions. The daughter of diplomats posted to Peking for three years in the mid-seventies, she charges about the grim con

How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone

Sasa Stanisic · 288 pages

Aleksandar is Comrade-in-Chief of fishing, the best magician in the non-aligned States and painter of unfinished things. He knows the first chapter of Marx's Das Kapital by heart but spends most of his time playing football in the Bosnian town of Visegrad on the banks of the river Drina. When his grandfather, a master storyteller, dies of the fastest heart attack in the world while watching Carl L

Burnt Sugar

Avni Doshi · 240 pages

Hideous Kinky

Esther Freud · 186 pages

Two little girls are taken by their mother to Morocco on a 1960s pilgrimage of self-discovery. For Mum it is not just an escape from the grinding conventions of English life but a quest for personal fulfilment; her children, however, seek something more solid and stable amidst the shifting desert sands.'Just open the book and begin, and instantly you will be first of all charmed, then intrigued an

The House on Mango Street

Sandra Cisneros · 110 pages

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A coming-of-age classic, acclaimed by critics, beloved by readers of all ages, taught in schools and universities alike, and translated around the world—from the winner of the 2019 PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature. The House on Mango Street is the remarkable story of Esperanza Cordero, a young Latina girl growing up in Chicago, inventing for he

Girl at War

Sara Novic · 320 pages

When her happy life in 1991 Croatia is shattered by civil war, ten-year-old Ana Juric is embroiled in a world of guerilla warfare and child soldiers before making a daring escape to America, where years later she struggles to hide her past.

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

Aimee Bender · 345 pages

The wondrous Aimee Bender conjures the lush and moving story of a girl whose magical gift is really a devastating curse. On the eve of her ninth birthday, unassuming Rose Edelstein, a girl at the periphery of schoolyard games and her distracted parents' attention, bites into her mother's homemade lemon-chocolate cake and discovers she has a magical gift: she can taste her mother's emotions in t

The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things

J.T. LeRoy · 251 pages

Circulated copies of LeRoy's handwritten notebook pages brought early attention to the then unpublished author. In print for the first time, these loosely connected autobiographical stories describe the harrowing experiences of a young boy's life on the run. From the heartbreaking "Meteor," where he struggles for the attention of his wandering mother, to the paranoia of "Coal"-'Whenever things fee

Hope Farm

Peggy Frew · 352 pages

The Notebook

Agota Kristof · 160 pages

Singing Songs

Meg Tilly · 252 pages

Child abuse from the perspective of the child. When Anna, the narrator, is five years old, her mother marries a drunkard who takes a fancy to her daughters, repeatedly raping one. The mother turns a blind eye.