Language and Literature / English: Senior School Novel Sets

Renowned urban artist Shepard Fairey's new look for Orwell's timeless satire

'All animals are equal. But some animals are more equal than others.'

Mr Jones of Manor Farm is so lazy and drunken that one day he forgets to feed his livestock. The ensuing rebellion under the leadership of the pigs Napoleon and Snowball leads to the animals taking over the farm. Vowing to eliminate the terrible inequities of the farmyard, the renamed Animal Farm is organised to benefit all who walk on four legs. But as time passes, the ideals of the rebellion are corrupted, then forgotten. And something new and unexpected emerges. . .

Animal Farm - the history of a revolution that went wrong - is George Orwell's brilliant satire on the corrupting influence of power.

DVD Available;
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When history teacher Ben Ross starts a classroom experiment, with the
intention of showing students the processes behind social control in Nazi
Germany, things get out of hand and the power of group pressure becomes a
frightening reality.

DVD Available:
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Bored and lonely after his family moves from Berlin to a place called "Out-With" in 1942, Bruno, the son of a Nazi officer, befriends a boy in striped pajamas who lives behind a wire fence.

DVD Available:
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This is the compelling story of how the skull of an Aboriginal man, found on the banks of the Murray River over 40 years ago, came to be returned to his Wamba Wamba descendants. It is a story of awakening, atonement, forgiveness and friendship. 'It is as if a whole window into Indigenous culture has blown open, not just the window, but every door in the house,' says John Danalis. Part history, part detective story, part cultural discovery and emotional journey, this is a book for young and old, showing the transformative and healing power of true reconciliation.

Summary: Xiomara Batista feels unheard and unable to hide in her Harlem neighborhood. Ever since her body grew into curves, she has learned to let her fists and her fierceness do the talking. But Xiomara has plenty she wants to say, and she pours all her frustration and passion onto the pages of a leather notebook, reciting the words to herself like prayers - especially after she catches feelings for a boy in her bio class named Aman, who her family can never know about. With Mami's determination to force her daughter to obey the laws of the church, Xiomara understands that her thoughts are best kept to herself. So when she is invited to join her school's slam poetry club, she doesn't know how she could ever attend without her mami finding out. But she still can't stop thinking about performing her poems.

This is the compelling story of how the skull of an Aboriginal man, found on the banks of the Murray River over 40 years ago, came to be returned to his Wamba Wamba descendants. It is a story of awakening, atonement, forgiveness and friendship. 'It is as if a whole window into Indigenous culture has blown open, not just the window, but every door in the house,' says John Danalis. Part history, part detective story, part cultural discovery and emotional journey, this is a book for young and old, showing the transformative and healing power of true reconciliation.

Alice, Hartley, Mitsy and Jamie are kids growing up in Broome before the Second World War. Their lives, although very different, are bound by friendship. Hartley and Alice Penrose are the children of an uneducated pearling master and a cultivated, disgruntled mother. Mitsy Sennosuke is Japanese, the daughter of Zeke, a diver working for Hartley and Alice s father, and Sadako, who makes soy sauce in a tin shed factory. Jamie Kilian is the son of a local magistrate, recently moved north from the city. Together, they unconsciously cross the boundaries of class and race, as they swim, joke and watch films in the cinema in Sheba Lane.But these happy, untroubled times end when lives are lost in a terrible cyclone, Alice falls for a wealthy cattleman pilot, a young woman is assaulted, and Hartley and Jamie compete for the love of Mitsy. The Second World War brings further strain into their lives. The four friends are no longer children but old enough to fight for their country. As Japanese bombs begin to fall like silver rain on northern Australia, loyalties are divided and friendships take on an altogether different form ... This thrilling and beautifully written new novel from Garry Disher evokes an era of Australia caught up in the events of war and its effects on people torn apart from all they know and hold dear in childhood.

'Deadly, unna' He was always saying that. All the Nungas did, but Dumby more than any of them. Dumby Red and Blacky don't have a lot in common. Dumby's the star of the footy team, he's got a killer smile and the knack with girls, and he's a Nunga. Blacky's a gutless wonder, needs braces, never knows what to say, and he's white. But they're friends... and it could be deadly, unna? This gutsy novel, set in a small coastal town in South Australia is a rites-of-passage story about two boys confronting the depth of racism that exists all around them.

Associated DVD details (MA15+) : http://library.goodshepherd.nt.edu.au?serviceId=ExternalEvent&brSn=35595&brKey=54365508

A young woman's promise to her dying grandmother leads her on a quest to
discover the truth of her own family's mysterious beginnings in this grim
retelling of the classic fairy tale "Briar Rose," or "The Sleeping Beauty.

A twisted, upside-down creation myth, Mary Shelley's chilling Gothic tale lays bare the dark side of science, and the horror within us all. It tells the story of Victor Frankenstein, who plunders graveyards to create a new being from the bodies of the dead - but whose botched creature causes nothing but murder and destruction. Written after a nightmare when its author was only eighteen, Frankenstein gave birth to the modern science fiction novel.

The Penguin English Library - 100 editions of the best fiction in English, from the eighteenth century and the very first novels to the beginning of the First World War.

Text is also available online from Project Gutenberg.

It is 1939. Nazi Germany. The country is holding its breath. Death has never been busier, and will become busier still. Liesel Meminger and her younger brother are being taken by their mother to live with a foster family outside Munich. Liesel's father was taken away on the breath of a single, unfamiliar word - Kommunist - and Liesel sees the fear of a similar fate in her mother's eyes. On the journey, Death visits the young boy, and notices Liesel. It will be the first of many near encounters. By her brother's graveside, Liesel's life is changed when she picks up a single object, partially hidden in the snow. It is The Gravedigger's Handbook, left there by accident, and it is her first act of book thievery. So begins a love affair with books and words, as Liesel, with the help of her accordion-playing foster father, learns to read. Soon she is stealing books from Nazi book-burnings, the mayor's wife's library, wherever there are books to be found. But these are dangerous times. When Liesel's foster family hides a Jewish fist-fighter in their basement, Liesel's world is both opened up, and closed down. 'The Book Thief' is a story about the power of words to make worlds. In superbly crafted writing that burns with intensity, award-winning author Markus Zusak has given us one of the most enduring stories of our time.

DVD Available:
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Drifters in search of work, George and his childlike friend Lennie, have nothing in the world except the clothes on their back - and a dream that one day they will have some land of their own. Eventually they find work on a ranch in California's Salinas Valley, but their hopes are dashed as Lennie - struggling against extreme cruelty, misunderstanding and feelings of jealousy - becomes a victim of his own strength. Tackling universal themes of friendship and shared vision, and giving a voice to America's lonely and dispossessed, Of Mice and Men remains Steinbeck's most popular work, achieving success as a novel, Broadway play and three acclaimed films.

DVD Available;
http://library.goodshepherd.nt.edu.au?serviceId=ExternalEvent&brSn=19668&brKey=647816559

Available on Clickview:

A Christmas Carol has become one of the most beloved stories in the English language. As much a part of the holiday season as holly, mistletoe, and evergreen wreaths, this perennial favorite continues to delight new readers and rekindle thoughts of charity and goodwill.
With its characters exhibiting many qualities ― as well as failures ― often ascribed to Dickens himself, the imaginative and entertaining tale relates Ebenezer Scrooge's eerie encounters with a series of spectral visitors. Journeying with them through Christmases past, present, and future, he is ultimately transformed from an arrogant, obstinate, and insensitive miser to a generous, warmhearted, and caring human being. Written by one of England's greatest and most popular novelists, A Christmas Carol has come to epitomize the true meaning of Christmas.

"'Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit 'em, but remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird'. A lawyer's advice to his children as he defends the real mockingbird of Harper Lee's classic novel - a black man charged with the rape of a white girl. Through the young eyes of Scout and Jem Finch, Harper Lee explores with rich humor and unswerving honesty the irrationality of adult attitudes toward race and class in the Deep South of the 1930s. The conscience of a town steeped in prejudice, violence, and hypocrisy is pricked by the stamina and quiet heroism of one man's struggle for justice. But the weight of history will only tolerate so much."

DVD information available: http://library.goodshepherd.nt.edu.au?serviceId=ExternalEvent&brSn=19667&brKey=647431810

Clickview film information available: https://clickv.ie/w/eAck

Josephine Alibrandi is 17, and in her final year of school. Dealing with her mum and the ways of her Nonna are daunting enough as she prepares for her exams. But Josie is about to discover real life gets in the way of her carefully-made plans. She suddenly has to deal with having her father around for the first time in her life, falling in love, her struggles with her Italian-Australian identity and the highs and lows of teen life.

Published in 1948 and set thirty-six years in the future, 1984 is George
Orwell's dark vision of the future. Written while Orwell was dying and based
on the work of the Russian author Yevgeny Zamyatin, it is a chilling
depiction of how the power of the state could come to dominate the lives of
individuals through cultural conditioning. Perhaps the most powerful science
fiction novel of the twentieth century, this apocalyptic satire shows with
grim conviction how Winston Smiths individual personality is wiped out and
how he is recreated in the Partys image until he does not just obey but
even loves Big Brother. Some critics have related Winston Smiths sufferings
to those Orwell underwent at preparatory school, experiences he wrote about
just before 1984. Orwell maintained that the book was written with the
explicit intention to alter other peoples idea of the kind of society they
should strive after

The unforgettable story of a mental ward and its inhabitants, especially the tyrannical Big Nurse Ratched and Randle Patrick McMurphy, the brawling, fun-loving new inmate who resolves to oppose her. We see the struggle through the eyes of Chief Bromden, the seemingly mute half-Indian patient who witnesses and understands McMurphy's heroic attempt to do battle with the powers that keep them all imprisoned.

DVD information also available: http://library.goodshepherd.nt.edu.au?serviceId=ExternalEvent&brSn=20285&brKey=960617414

Afghanistan, 1975: Twelve-year-old Amir is desperate to win the local kite-fighting tournament and his loyal friend Hassan promises to help him. But neither of the boys can foresee what will happen to Hassan that afternoon, an event that is to shatter their lives. After the Russians invade and the family is forced to flee to America, Amir realises that one day he must return to Afghanistan under Taliban rule to find the one thing that his new world cannot grant him: redemption.

DVD available at: http://library.goodshepherd.nt.edu.au?serviceId=ExternalEvent&brSn=19671&brKey=648970805

On the hottest day of the summer of 1935, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis sees her older sister Cecilia strip off her clothes and plunge into the fountain in the garden of their country house. Watching Cecilia is their housekeeper's son Robbie Turner, a childhood friend who, along with Briony's sister, has recently graduated from Cambridge. By the end of that day the lives of all three will have been changed forever. Robbie and Cecilia will have crossed a boundary they had never before dared to approach and will have become victims of the younger girl's scheming imagination. And Briony will have committed a dreadful crime, the guilt for which will color her entire life. In each of his novels Ian McEwan has brilliantly drawn his reader into the intimate lives and situations of his characters. But never before has he worked with so large a canvas: In Atonement he takes the reader from a manor house in England in 1935 to the retreat from Dunkirk in 1941; from the London's World War II military hospitals to a reunion of the Tallis clan in 1999. Atonement is Ian McEwan's finest achievement. Brilliant and utterly enthralling in its depiction of childhood, love and war, England and class, the novel is at its center a profound-and profoundly moving-exploration of shame and forgiveness and the difficulty of absolution.

The Reader is both a literary surprise and a moral challenge: a riveting,
provocative, and deeply moving novel about a young boy's erotic awakening in
a passionate, clandestine love affair with an older woman, and what happens
to them both when the secrets in her past are revealed. Fifteen-year-old
Michael Berg becomes ill on the way home from school. A woman takes care of
him. Later, the boy arrives at her home with a bunch of flowers to thank
her. And then comes back again. Hanna is the first woman he has ever
desired. But there is something slightly off-key about her. His questions
about her family and her life go unanswered. One day Hanna simply
disappears. Michael's life goes on, but he can't forget her. Years later, as
a law student observing a trial in Germany, Michael is shocked to realize
that the person in the dock is Hanna. The woman he had loved so passionately
is a criminal. Much about her behavior during the trial makes no sense. But
then, suddenly and terribly, it does - Hanna is not only obliged to answer
for a horrible crime, she is also desperately concealing an even deeper
secret. As the past erupts into the present - both Michael's past with
Hanna, and the past of Germany itself - Michael must accept that he will
never be free of either of them.

DVD Available:
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Despite his overwhelming fear of interacting with people, Christopher, a mathematically-gifted, autistic fifteen-year-old boy, decides to investigate the murder of a neighbor's dog and uncovers secret information about his mother.
Winner of the Whitbread Book of the Year

Audio CD Available;

AU Author. Meet Ed Kennedy - cab driving prodigy, pathetic card player and useless at sex. He lives in a suburban shack, shares coffee with his dog, the Doorman, and he's in nervous love with Audrey. His life is one of peaceful routine and incompetence - until he inadvertently stops a bank robbery. That's when the first Ace turns up. That's when Ed becomes the messenger. Chosen to care, he makes his way through town, helping and hurting (where necessary) until only one question remains. Who's behind Ed's mission? 'The Messenger', by the highly acclaimed author Markus Zusak, is a cryptic journey filled with laughter, fists and love.

Georgie Jutland is a mess. At forty, with her career in ruins, she finds herself stranded in White Point with a fisherman she doesn't love and two kids whose dead mother she can never replace. Leached of all confidence, she spends her days in isolated tedium and her nights in a blur of vodka self-recrimination. One morning, in the boozy pre-dawn gloom, she sees, a shadow drifting up the beach below - a loner called Luther Fox, with danger in his wake.

Summary: Fin has a seemingly normal day at school not knowing that on the other side of the world nuclear missiles are being detonated When he wakes up the next morning, it's dark, bitterly cold and snow is falling. There is no internet, no TV, no power and no parents Fin and his younger brother Max must find a way to survive all on their own.

The Complete Maus by Art Spiegelman - the Pulitzer prize-winning Holocaust survivor story

The Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus tells the story of Vladek Spiegelman, a Jewish survivor of Hitler's Europe, and his son, a cartoonist coming to terms with his father's story. Maus approaches the unspeakable through the diminutive. Its form, the cartoon (the Nazis are cats, the Jews mice), shocks us out of any lingering sense of familiarity and succeeds in 'drawing us closer to the bleak heart of the Holocaust' (The New York Times).

Maus is a haunting tale within a tale. Vladek's harrowing story of survival is woven into the author's account of his tortured relationship with his aging father. Against the backdrop of guilt brought by survival, they stage a normal life of small arguments and unhappy visits. This astonishing retelling of our century's grisliest news is a story of survival, not only of Vladek but of the children who survive even the survivors. Maus studies the bloody pawprints of history and tracks its meaning for all of us.

This combined, definitive edition includes Maus I: A Survivor's Tale and Maus II.

Written by Frank Miller Art and cover by David Mazucchelli A new softcover edition of one of the most important and critically acclaimed Batman adventures eve! In addition to telling the entire dramatic story of Batman's first year fighting crime, this collection includes loads of reproductions of original pencils, script pages, promotional art, unseen Mazzucchelli Batman art and more!

Picture Book: Two diverse countries and cultures are linked by this two-in-one
wordless picture book comprising two stories designed to be reads
imultaneously, the English from the left, the Arabic from the right. Page
by page the lives of two little boys are shown, one from an urban family in
Sydney, Australia, the other from Morocco. From busy motorways to
desertlandscapes, these worlds couldn't be further apart yet with the
journey of a homemade Moroccan carpet into the Australian boy's home we are
shown how these separate lives become intertwined. The theme illustrates
how our lives reflect each other and that we are all connected Includes a
short introduction and author's note in both English and Arabic Text in
English and Arabic.

Picture Book: What drives so many to leave everything behind and journey to a mysterious country; a place without family or friends, where everything is nameless and the future is unknown? This silent graphic novel is the story of every migrant, every refugee, every displaced person, and a tribute to those who have made the journey.

Picture Book: In a strange and sinister world, Ben is in hiding from the 'woolvs'. His only ally, Missus Radinski, doesn't believe the woolvs exist - until it is too late.
Alone, Ben must go out into the streets and confront his fears.

In Woolvs in the Sitee, award-winning team Margaret Wild and Anne Spudvilas chart new territory. As with their remarkable Jenny Angel, they have again created a book that is both beautiful and challenging.

Written in phonic English.

Picture Book: The rabbits came many grandparents ago. They built houses, made roads, had children. They cut down trees. A whole continent of rabbits....

In 1992, Art Spiegelman's two-volume illustrated novel Maus: A Survivor's
Tale was awarded a special-category Pulitzer Prize. In it, Spiegelman tells
the gripping story of his father's experiences in the Holocaust. The book
portrays the trials Spiegelman's father endured as a Jewish refugee in the
ghettos and concentration camps of Poland during World War II, his
difficulties assimilating to American life following his immigration to New
York, and the author's own troubled sense of self as he grapples with his
father's history." "Ten scholars explore many aspects of the pivotal work,
including Spiegelman's use of animal characters, the influence of other
"comix" artists, the role of the mother and its relation to gender issues,
the use of repeating images such as smoke and blood, Maus's place among
Holocaust testimonials, its appropriation of cinematic technique, its use of
language and styles of dialect, and the implications of the work's critical
and commercial success.

Test Prep Book's PSAT Reading and Writing Workbook: PSAT Prep 2018 & 2019 English Study Guide & 2 Practice Tests

Developed by Test Prep Books for test takers trying to achieve passing PSAT scores Reading and Writing exam, this comprehensive study guide includes:

-Quick Overview
-Test-Taking Strategies
-Introduction
-Reading
-Writing and Language
-Practice Questions
-Detailed Answer Explanations

On San Piedro, an island of rugged, spectacular beauty in Puget Sound, home to salmon fishermen and strawberry farmers, a Japanese-American fisherman stands trial, charged with coldblooded murder. The year is 1954, and the shadow of World War II, with its brutality abroad and internment of Japanese Americans at home, hangs over the courtroom. Ishmael Chambers, who lost an arm in the Pacific war and now runs the island newspaper inherited from his father, is among the journalists covering the trial - a trial that brings him close, once again, to Hatsue Miyomoto, the wife of the accused man and Ishmael's never-forgotten boyhood love. Hatsue and Ishmael, in the years before the war came between them, had dug clams together, picked strawberries in San Piedro's verdant fields, and passed long hours in the secrecy of a giant hollow cedar tree. Now, as a heavy snowfall surrounds and impedes the progress of Kabuo Miyomoto's trial, they and the other participants must come to a reckoning with the past, with culture, nature, and love, and with the possibilities of the human will. Both suspenseful and beautifully crafted, Snow Falling on Cedars portrays the psychology of a community, the ambiguities of justice, the racism that persists even between neighbors, and the necessity of individual moral action despite the indifference of nature and circumstance.

DVD information available: http://library.goodshepherd.nt.edu.au?serviceId=ExternalEvent&brSn=20074&brKey=600107695

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." To the delight of Mrs Bennet, a wealthy young bachelor arrives in the neighbourhood, presenting her with the perfect opportunity to marry off the eldest of her five daughters...But what of Elizabeth, her second daughter -and the haughty Mr Darcy?

The story of a boy who is suddenly plucked from his life in a remote and peaceful village to find himself a pawn in a political scheme filled with treacherous warlords, rivalry and the intensity of first love. Set in Japan.

Mike Klingenberg doesn't get why people think he's boring. Sure, he doesn't
have many friends. (Okay, zero friends.) And everyone laughs at him when he
reads his essays out loud in class. And he's never invited to parties -
including the gorgeous Tatiana's party of the year. Andre Tschichatschow,
aka Tschick (not even the teachers can pronounce his name), is new in
school, and a whole different kind of unpopular. He always looks like he's
just been in a fight, his clothes are tragic, and he never talks to anyone.
But one day Tschick shows up at Mike's house out of the blue. Turns out he
wasn't invited to Tatiana's party either, and he's ready to do something
about it. Forget the popular kids: Together, Mike and Tschick are heading
out on a road trip. No parents, no map, no destination. Will they get
hopelessly lost in the middle of nowhere? Probably. Will they meet crazy
people and get into serious trouble? Definitely. But will they ever be
called boring again? Not a chance.

One by one the boys begin to fall...In 1914, a room full of German schoolboys, fresh-faced and idealistic, are goaded by their schoolmaster to troop off to the 'glorious war'. With the fire and patriotism of youth, they sign up. What follows is the moving story of a young 'unknown soldier' experiencing the horror and disillusionment of life in the trenches.

DVD Available;
http://library.goodshepherd.nt.edu.au?serviceId=ExternalEvent&brSn=20081&brKey=608956920

Designed to appeal to the book lover, the Macmillan Collector's Library is a series of beautiful gift editions of much loved classic titles. Macmillan Collector's Library are books to love and treasure. This elegant edition features an afterword by Dr Keith Carabine, specialist in American literature and former chair of the Joseph Conrad society.

One night on the Thames, Charles Marlowe tells his fellow sailors the vivid and brutal tale of his time as a riverboat captain in the Belgian Congo. From the mists of London we are whisked to the darkness of Africa's colonial heart - and into the thrall of the tyrannical Kurtz, an ivory trader who has established himself as a terrifying demi-god.

Sinister and incisive, Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad has retained the fascination of readers and scholars alike. It is accompanied here by the stories with which it has been published since 1902: the autobiographical Youth, and the tale of an old man's fall from fortune, The End of the Tether.