Books for Sixth Form and Adult Readers
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
Okonkwo is the greatest wrestler and warrior alive, and his fame spreads throughout West Africa like a bush-fire in the harmattan. But when he accidentally kills a clansman, things begin to fall apart.
When Okonkwo returns from exile to find missionaries and colonial governors have arrived in the village. With his world thrown radically off-balance he can only hurtle towards tragedy.
Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The limits of fifteen year old Kambili’s world are defined by the high walls of her family estate and the dictates of her fanatically religious father. Her life is regulated by schedules: prayer, sleep, study, prayer.
When Nigeria is shaken by a military coup, Kambili’s father, involved mysteriously in the political crisis, sends her to live with her aunt. In this house, noisy and full of laughter, she discovers life and love and a terrible, bruising secret deep within her family.
Half a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Ugwu, a boy from a poor village, works as a houseboy for a university professor. Olanna, a young woman, has abandoned her life of privilege in Lagos to live with her charismatic new lover, the professor. And Richard, a shy English writer, is in thrall to Olanna’s enigmatic twin sister. As the horrific Biafran War engulfs them, they are thrown together and pulled apart in ways they had never imagined.
Island Beneath the Sea by Isabel Allende
Born a slave on the island of Saint-Domingue, Tété is the product of violent union between an African mother she never knew and one of the white sailors who brought her into bondage.
When twenty year old Toulouse Valmorain arrives on the island in 1770, it is with powdered wigs in his trunks and dreams of financial success in his mind. But running his father's plantation, Saint Lazare, is neither glamorous nor easy.
When bloody revolution arrives at the gates of Saint Lazare, they flee the island for the decadence and opportunity of New Orleans. There, Tété finally forges a new life but her connection to Valmorain is deeper than anyone knows and not so easily severed.
I know why the Cagebird Sings by Maya Angelou
Abandoned by their parents, Maya and her older brother Bailey are sent to live with their grandmother and uncle in the small Southern town of Stamps in Arkansas. Struggling with rejection, they endure the prejudice of their white neighbours and suffer several racist incidents. One day, their father unexpectedly returns and takes the children to live with their mother in St Louis, Missouri. Aged only eight, Maya is abused by her mother's boyfriend, an experience that haunts her for a lifetime. Filled with guilt and shame, she refuses to speak to anyone except Bailey, until she meets Mrs Bertha Flowers, who encourages her love of books, helping her to find her voice and regain her own strong spirit.
Cry Freedom by John Briley
Under South Africa's brutal apartheid regime, black activist Steve Biko has been working tirelessly for years to undermine the system when he meets white journalist Donald Woods. Initially suspicious of Biko and his motives, Woods finds himself united with Biko in common cause after Biko reveals to him the true extent of police atrocities in the black townships.
When tragedy strikes, the powerful bond that has been forged between them leads Woods to make a courageous stand on his friend's behalf, risking everything to expose the horrors of this murderous regime.
The last Runaway by Tracy Chevalier
When modest Quaker Honor Bright sails from Bristol with her sister, she is fleeing heartache for a new life in America, far from home. But tragedy leaves her alone and vulnerable, torn between two worlds and dependent on the kindness of strangers. Life in 1850s Ohio is precarious and unsentimental. The sun is too hot, the thunderstorms too violent, the snow too deep. The roads are spattered with mud and spit. The woods are home to skunks and raccoons. They also shelter slaves escaping north to freedom.
Should Honor hide runaways from the ruthless men who hunt them down? The Quaker community she has joined may oppose slavery in principle, but does it have the courage to help her defy the law?
The Power of One by Bryce Courtenay
No stranger to the injustice of racial hatred in 1940s South Africa, five year old Peekay learns the hard way the first secret of survival and self-preservation: The Power of One.
Peekay is the only English schoolboy at the Afrikaans boarding-school, where he crawls uncomprehending from the bullying fists of his poisonous and imaginative classmates. A happier encounter with amateur boxer Hoppie Groenewald inspires in Peekay a fiery ambition, to be welterweight champion of the world.
Head above Water by Buchi Emecheta
This powerful autobiography is written in Buchi Emecheta's frank and inimitable style. It is gutsy, down-to earth and deeply confessional. At the same time, it reveals an author at the height of her powers reflecting with some bemusement on the unlikeliness of her own success. At the age of twenty-two, Buchi Emecheta left her husband and found herself alone with five small children to support in cold and foggy North London - a long way from her native Nigeria. With few qualifications and no prospects - how was she to keep her head above water? By becoming a writer, she decided - and through sheer determination against all the odds, that was what she became. She fought for a degree in Sociology and a decent place to live, and her life changed when in 1972, the New Statesman, serialised her observational essays and her first book, In the Ditch was published. Emecheta's colourful account of her young life in Africa, her struggle to establish herself in the UK and then as writer - subject to the whims of publishers and the vagaries of the Establishment - evokes with wry humour and raw feeling just what it means to be poor, black, female and unrecognised in London.
Beethoven was One Sixteenth Black by Nadine Gordimer
This rich story collection will be a reminder to Nadine Gordimer's countless admirers and a taster for the uninitiated of her enduring imaginative power. A woman gauges the state of her marriage by the tone of her husband's cello; a wife reads her husband's mood by the scent in the nape of his neck; a newly emigrated couple are divided by visual obsession, he with his native Budapest, she with South African suburbia. With consummate artistry, Gordimer illustrates the show downs, standoffs and highlights of human intimacy, while penetrating the nuances of immigration, national identity and race.
Roots by Alex Haley
Tracing his ancestry through six generations, slaves and freedmen, farmers and blacksmiths, lawyers and architects back to Africa, Alex Haley discovered a sixteen year old youth, Kunta Kinte.
It was this young man, who had been torn from his homeland and in torment and anguish brought to the slave markets of the New World, who held the key to Haley's deep and distant past.
When our Worlds Collided by Danielle Jawando
A powerful coming-of-age story about chance encounters, injustice and how the choices that we make can completely change our future.
When fourteen-year-old Shaq is stabbed outside of a busy shopping centre in Manchester, three teenagers from very different walks of life are unexpectedly brought together. What follows flips their worlds upside down and makes Chantelle, Jackson, and Marc question the deep-rooted prejudice and racism that exists within the police, the media, and the rest of society.
The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd
Lily has grown up believing she accidentally killed her mother when she was four years old. Now, at fourteen, she yearns for forgiveness and a mother's love. Living on a peach farm in South Carolina with her harsh and unforgiving father, she has only one friend, Rosaleen, a black servant.
When racial tension explodes one summer afternoon and Rosaleen is arrested and beaten, Lily chooses to flee with her. Fugitives from justice, the pair follow a trail left by the woman who died ten years before. Finding sanctuary in the home of three beekeeping sisters, Lily starts a journey as much about her understanding of the world as about the mystery surrounding her mother.
Small Island by Andrea Levy
It is 1948, and England is recovering from a war. But at 21 Nevern Street, London, the conflict has only just begun. Queenie Bligh's neighbours do not approve when she agrees to take in Jamaican lodgers, but Queenie does not know when her husband will return, or if he will come back at all. What else can she do?
Gilbert Joseph was one of the several thousand Jamaican men who joined the RAF to fight against Hitler. Returning to England as a civilian he finds himself treated very differently. It is desperation that makes him remember a wartime friendship with Queenie and knock at her door. Gilbert's wife Hortense, too, had longed to leave Jamaica and start a better life in England and is shocked when she joins him in London.
Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela
The riveting memoirs of the outstanding moral and political leader of our time, Long Walk to Freedom brilliantly re-creates the drama of the experiences that helped shape Nelson Mandela's destiny.
Emotive, compelling, and uplifting, Long Walk to Freedom is the exhilarating story of an epic life; a story of hardship, resilience, and ultimate triumph told with the clarity and eloquence of a born leader.
Beloved by Toni Morrison
It is the mid-1800s. At Sweet Home in Kentuckhy, an era is ending as slavery comes under attack from the abolitionists. The worlds of Halle and Paul D are to be destroyed in a cataclysm of torment and agony. The world of Sethe, however, is to turn from one of love to one of violence and death, the death of Sethe's baby daughter Beloved, whose name is the single word on the tombstone, who died at her mother's hands and who will return to claim retribution.
The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
Pecola Breedlove, a young black girl, prays every day for beauty. Mocked by other children for the dark skin, curly hair and brown eyes that set her apart, she yearns for normalcy, for the blond hair and blue eyes that she believes will allow her to finally fit in.
Yet as her dream grows more fervent, her life slowly starts to disintegrate in the face of adversity and strife.
Twelve Years a Slave by Soloman Northup
Solomon Northup was born a free man in New York State. At the age of 33 he was kidnapped in Washington D.C. and placed in an underground slave pen. Northup was transported by ship to New Orleans where he was sold into slavery. He spent the next 12 years working as a carpenter, driver and cotton picker. This narrative reveals how Northup survived the harsh conditions of slavery, including smallpox, lashings and an attempted hanging. Solomon Northup was among a select few who were freed from slavery. His account describes the daily life of slaves in Louisiana, their diet and living conditions, the relationship between master and slave and how slave catchers used to recapture runaways.
Northup's first person account published in 1853, was a dramatic story in the national debate over slavery that took place in the nine years leading up to the start of the American Civil War.
The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama
In The Audacity of Hope, Barack Obama calls for a different brand of politics. He writes with surprising intimacy and self deprecating humor, about settling in as a senator, seeking to balance the demands of public service and family life, and his own deepening religious commitment. At the heart of this book is Obama's vision of how we can move beyond our divisions to tackle concrete problems. Underlying his stories about family, friends, members of the Senate and even the president is a vigorous search for connection.
A president and a lawyer, a professor and a father, a Christian and a skeptic and above all, a student of history and human nature, Barak Obama has written a book of transforming power.
Black and British by David Olusosa
When did Africans first come to Britain?
Who are the well-dressed black children in Georgian paintings?
Why did the American Civil War disrupt the Industrial Revolution?
These and many other questions are answered in this essential introduction to 1800 years of the Black British history: from the Roman Africans who guarded Hadrian’s Wall right up to the present day.
The Human Stain by Philip Roth
It is 1998, the year in which America is whipped into a frenzy of prurience by the impeachment of a president, and in a small New England town, an aging classics professor, Coleman Silk, is forced to retire when his colleagues decree that he is a racist. The charge is a lie, but the real truth about Silk would have astonished even his most virulent accuser.
Coleman Silk has a secret, one which has been kept for 50 years from his wife, his four children, his colleagues, and his friends, including the writer Nathan Zuckerman.
White Teeth by Zadie Smith
White Teeth is the story that follows two men from different backgrounds who meet and become friends during World War II.
The book starts on New Year’s Day in 1975 with the attempted and failed suicide of a middle aged Englishman named Archie Jones following his failed marriage. Archie is good friends with a Bangladeshi immigrant named Samad Iqbal, who is also recently married to a young woman, Alsana Begum.
The story looks at how people's pasts affect their lives now, and the lives and futures of their children.
The Help by Kathryn Stockett
There's Aibileen, raising her 17th white child and nursing the hurt caused by her own son's tragic death; Minny, whose cooking is nearly as sassy as her tongue and white Miss Skeeter, home from college, who wants to know why her beloved maid has disappeared.
Skeeter, Aibileen and Minny. No one would believe they'd be friends; fewer still would tolerate it. But as each woman finds the courage to cross boundaries, they come to depend and rely upon one another. Each is in a search of a truth, and together they have an extraordinary story to tell.
Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriett Beecher Stowe
The story centers on the lives of several slaves of a Kentucky farmer named Arthur Shelby. Mounting debts forces the farmer to sell two of his slaves, Uncle Tom, a middle-aged man with a wife and children, and Harry, the son of Eliza, the family’s maid. Fearing separation from her child, Eliza runs away with her son to try and reunite with her husband George, also an escaped slave by travelling north to Canada. Meanwhile Tom is sold and placed on a Mississippi river boat where he befriends a young white girl named Eva, whose father Augustine St. Clare purchases him and takes him to their home in New Orleans. What follows for Tom is a tragic set of circumstances which highlighted the brutal reality of slavery in early 19th Century America.
The Colour Purple by Alice Walker
Celie has grown up poor in rural Georgia, despised by the society around her and abused by her own family. She strives to protect her sister, Nettie, from a similar fate, and while Nettie escapes to a new life as a missionary in Africa, Celie is left behind without her best friend and confidante, married off to an older suitor, and sentenced to a life alone with a harsh and brutal husband.
In an attempt to transcend a life that often seems too much to bear, Celie begins writing letters directly to God. She then meets Shug Avery, her husband’s mistress and her stepson’s wife, Sophia, who challenges her to fight for independence. And though the many letters from Celie’s sister are hidden by her husband, Nettie’s unwavering support will prove to be the most breathtaking of all.
Too Black Too Strong by Benjamin Zephaniah
this book addresses the struggles of black Britain more forcefully than all his previous books. With poems like Chant of a Homesick Nigga and Kill Them Before Ramadan, Benjamin Zephaniah shows that he is a poet who will not stay silent, who does not pull any punches, writing out of a sense of urgency and a commitment to social justice. He opens this hard hitting and blackly funny book of poems with an outspoken comment on where he is coming from, setting his poetry against the political landscape of Britain.
N. Raddon - September 2023