Adventure & Mountaineering

Annapurna

By Maurice Herzog

With Mr Allcock

In 1950, no mountain higher than 8,000 meters had ever been climbed. Maurice Herzog and other members of the French Alpine Club resolved to try. This is the enthralling story of the first conquest of Annapurna and the harrowing descent. With breathtaking courage and grit manifest on every page, Annapurna is one of the greatest adventure stories ever told.

Climate Fiction

Dry

By Neal Shusterman

With Mrs A Patterson

The drought—or the Tap-Out, as everyone calls it—has been going on for a while now. Everyone’s lives have become an endless list of don’ts: don’t water the lawn, don’t fill up your pool, don’t take long showers. Until the taps run dry. Suddenly, Alyssa’s quiet suburban street spirals into a warzone of desperation; neighbors and families turned against each other on the hunt for water. And when her parents don’t return and her life—and the life of her brother—is threatened, Alyssa has to make impossible choices if she’s going to survive.

Dystopia

They

By Kay Dick

With Dr Lexton

THEY are coming, THEY are here, THEY are taking literature, art, music, all the cultural treasures that you value and love. THEY stalk the shadows, whisper in the corners, steal through rooms. You won't see them and you won't escape. Lost for forty years and recently redisovered, this dark, eerie and sinister 'sequence of unease' about a dystopian Britain will chill your soul and rewire your brain.

Economics

Africa is not a country: breaking Stereotypes of Modern Africa

By Dipo Faloyin

With Mr Whitworth & Mrs Campion

So often Africa is depicted simplistically as an arid red landscape of famines and safaris, uniquely plagued by poverty and strife. In this funny and insightful book, Dipo Faloyin offers a much-needed corrective, creating a fresh and multifaceted view of this vast continent.

Fiction: Friendship

The Snow Goose

By Paul Gallico

With Mrs M Patterson

A poignant tale of friendship set in the years leading up to World War II, centered around the unlikely friendship between a reclusive artist, Philip Rhayader, and a young girl, Fritha, in the Essex marshlands of England. Their bond deepens over a wounded snow goose they nurse back to health, symbolizing hope and beauty in the midst of the looming darkness of war.

Fiction: Human Connections

The Inseparables

By Simone de Beauvoir

With Ms Gutulan

Written by Simone de Beauvoir - iconic thinker of the 20th Century - but only recently discovered, this novella is a story of an unlikely friendship between two girls. They talk for hours about equality, justice, war and religion; they build a world of their own. But as they grow into young women, the pressures of society mount, threatening everything.

Graphic novel - Vietnam War

Such A Lovely Little War : Saigon 1961-1963

By Marcelino Truong

With Ms Atherton

Beautifully drawn graphic memoir of a young boy growing up in the early years of the Vietnam War. Marco is the son of a Vietnamese diplomat and his mother is French. This emotionally powerful graphic novel is a family story intertwined with a broader history of Vietnam at war.

Heroines in Greek Mythology

Atalanta

By Jennifer Saint

With Miss Anderson

When a daughter is born to the King of Arcadia, she brings only disappointment. Left exposed on a mountainside, the defenceless infant Atalanta, is left to the mercy of a passing mother bear and raised alongside the cubs under the protective eye of the goddess Artemis. Swearing that she will prove her worth alongside the famed heroes of Greece, Atalanta leaves her forest to join Jason's band of Argonauts. But can she carve out her own place in the legends in a world made for men?

Historical Fiction

Imperium

By Robert Harris

With Mrs Howe & Ms Oliver

When Tiro, the confidential secretary of a Roman senator, opens the door to a terrified stranger on a cold November morning, he sets in motion a chain of events which will eventually propel his master into one of the famous courtroom dramas in history. This work takes the reader inside the treacherous world of Roman politics.

Horror

The Mist

By Stephen King

With Mr Rea

Following a freak summer storm, David Drayton, his son Billy join dozens of others and head to the local grocery store to replenish supplies. Once there, they become trapped by a strange mist that has enveloped the town. Violent forces concealed in the mist are starting to emerge. And there is another shocking threat from within - one group of survivors, led by a religious zealot, is calling for a sacrifice. Now David and his son must try to escape. But what's outside may be even more dangerous.

Munich

Munich

By Robert Harris

With Mr Gutteridge

A fictionalised account of the fraught days of European diplomacy in 1936. Should Britain appease Hitler, give him what he wants in order to avoid war? The novel follows the story through the eyes of young British and German diplomats, friends before Hitler’s takeover, now rivals. The novel covers topical themes of how to respond to a dictator’s expansionist dreams.

Murder & Mystery

The Thursday Murder Club

By Richard Osman

With Ms Charlier

A bestselling hit book by the very funny Osman. Murder, mystery and a host of interesting characters. This book is an easy read, enjoyable and satisfying but with some great underlying themes about how we shouldn't judge anybody by lazy stereotypes. 'In a peaceful retirement village, four unlikely friends meet up once a week to investigate unsolved murders.But when a brutal killing takes place on their very doorstep, the Thursday Murder Club find themselves in the middle of their first live case.Elizabeth, Joyce, Ibrahim and Ron might be pushing eighty but they still have a few tricks up their sleeves.Can our unorthodox but brilliant gang catch the killer before it's too late?'

Napoleon

Napoleon: A Concise Biography

By David Bell

With Dr Gilbert

By his late twenties, Napoleon was already one of the greatest generals in European history. At thirty, he had become absolute master of Europe's most powerful country. In his early forties, he ruled a European empire more powerful than any since Rome, fighting wars that changed the shape of the continent and brought death to millions. Then everything collapsed... (152 pages)

Satire, banned, postmodern

Slaughterhouse 5

By Kurt Vonnegut

With Mr Evans

Blending the Allied Forces’ fire-bombing of Dresden in 1945 with a wildly imaginative science fiction storyline, Vonnegut’s novel is semi-autobiographical, given that he was imprisoned in a meat locker at the time of the bombing. Billy Pilgrim is the central figure in the story, who joins the non-linear (think Pulp Fiction) story together. So it goes.

Sci-Fi

Arrival (Stories of your Life and Others)

By Ted Chiang

With Mr O'Neill

This is a collection of short stories. In Arrival, alien lifeforms suddenly appear on Earth. When a linguist is brought in to help communicate with them and discern their intentions, her new knowledge of their language and its nonlinear structure allows her to see future events and all the joy and pain they may bring. In each story of this incredible collection, with sharp intelligence and humor, Ted Chiang examines what it means to be alive in a world marked by uncertainty, but also by wonder.

When Math goes wrong

Humble Pi: A comedy of Maths Errors

By Matt Parker

With Mrs Hassan

Matt Parker, a former teacher, is a stand-up comedian, author and mathematician. The first ever maths book to be a No.1 Bestseller shows us what happens when maths goes wrong in the real world What makes a bridge wobble when it's not meant to? How do billions of dollars mysteriously vanish into thin air? How does a building rock when its resonant frequency matches a gym class leaping to Snap's 1990 hit I've Got The Power? The answer is maths. Or, to be precise, what happens when maths goes wrong in the real world. As Matt Parker shows us, our modern lives are built on maths- computer programmes, finance, engineering. And most of the time this maths works quietly behind the scenes, until ... it doesn't.

WW2

A Woman of no Importance

By Sonia Purnell

With Miss L Bampton

"In 1942, the Gestapo would stop at nothing to track down a mysterious 'limping lady' who was fighting for the freedom of France. The Nazi chiefs issued a simple but urgent command: 'She is the most dangerous of all Allied spies. We must find and destroy her.'

The Gestapo's target was Virginia Hall, a glamorous American with a wooden leg who broke through the barriers against her gender and disability to be the first woman to infiltrate Vichy France for the SOE. In so doing she helped turn the course of the intelligence war."

Coming of Age Fiction

The Catcher in the Rye

By J. D. Salinger

With Mr Head

'If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.'