Patrick Ness's 2011 fantasy novel A Monster Calls is about a thirteen-year-old boy who learns to overcome his denial about his mother's terminal cancer. Haunted by a nightmare in which his dying mother slips from his grasp as she falls off a...

Fifteen Dogs is the second novel in André Alexis' planned five-book series, The Quincunx Cycle—each work of which is centered around the philosophical themes of faith, love, place, power, and hatred. Specifically, Fifteen Dogs tells the story of a...

Published in 2010, Sharon M. Draper’s novel Out of My Mind stayed on the New York Times Best Seller list for two years. Written from the perspective of Melody Brooks, an eleven-year-old girl with cerebral palsy, Out of My Mind gives a window onto...

Franz Kafka's 1925 novel The Trial is about Josef K., a banker who is prosecuted by a court he has never heard of for a crime that is never revealed. Although K. attempts to fight the illogical accusation, the perplexing legal system steadily...

Bao Ninh is a Vietnamese writer born on October 18, 1952, in Hanoi. He served as a soldier in the Glorious 27th Youth Brigade during the Vietnam War, and he came back home as one of only ten survivors in his unit of five hundred. The war had an...

The Boat is a collection of short stories heavily influenced by the author’s background and childhood experiences. Born in Vietnam, Nam Le fled to Australia with his parents while still a baby. The family was one of the many families of “boat...

A Little Life was written by Hanya Yanagihara and was published in March 2015 by Doubleday. A Little Life is Yanagihara's second novel, and due to the difficult subject matter, neither the author nor editor predicted that the novel would be...

“The Fly” was published in the The Nation and Athenaeum in 1922. At the time, Mansfield was grieving over the loss of her brother, who died in a military training accident shortly before he was to be deployed to France at the start of World War I....

John Grisham wrote A Time to Kill, a legal thriller, in 1989 while he was a practicing lawyer in Mississippi. While observing a trial in the courthouse near his practice, he witnessed the testimony of a 12-year-old who was raped and beaten, and...

Fire on the Mountain is a 1977 novel by Anita Desai that deals with the subjects of solitude, existentialism, and oppression of females in patriarchal Indian society. The book tells the story of Nanda Kaul, a widowed, reclusive woman who has to...

The Water Dancer is Ta-Nehisi Coates’ first novel. It debuted at number one on The New York Times fiction best-seller list and was a selection for Oprah's Book Club in 2019. Coates has said that he worked on the novel for a decade in “various...

Set in the slums of Melbourne in 1919, Robert Newton's Runner follows fifteen-year-old Charlie Feehan as he drops out of school to take a job running packages and collecting money for a notorious gangster named Squizzy Taylor.

Though the job helps...

Lion is a 2016 film based on Saroo Brierley's autobiographical novel, A Long Way Home. The film tells the story of a 30-year-old man who was adopted at the age of five in India and now lives in Australia, who travels back to India in an attempt to...