Five books your child should not miss out on

We here in the English department are huge believers in the power and importance and reading. Not only for sharpening English language skills, but also to cultivate knowledge and experience that which only an immersive book can provide.
 
Now, of course, reading is an integral part of the curriculum from beginning to end, and your child will read several abridged versions of often classic titles. The benefit of this is undoubted. However, book study in the classroom only provides one part of the puzzle. Reading in English, and doing so for pleasure, is one of the great markers for mastery of the language and insodoing, your son or daughter will not require often inadequate translations of these seminal works and enjoy them in their pure and unadulterated form.
 
As a result, we have compiled a list of five essential (and accessible) books for your child to read in the original English form.

 
A searing account of George Orwell’s experiences of working-class life in the bleak industrial heartlands of Yorkshire and Lancashire, The Road to Wigan Pier is a brilliant and bitter polemic that has lost none of its political impact over time. His graphically unforgettable descriptions of social injustice, slum housing, mining conditions, squalor, hunger and growing unemployment are written with unblinking honesty, fury and great humanity. This book will be a favourite with the more politically aware of your children.
 
2 – A Farewell to Arms – Ernest Hemingway
 
A former Madrid resident himself, the author of this classic needs no introduction. In 1918 Ernest Hemingway went to war, to the war to end all wars. He volunteered for ambulance service in Italy, was wounded, and twice decorated. Out of his experiences came A Farewell to Arms. Hemingway's description of war is unforgettable. He recreates the fear, the comradeship, the courage of his young American volunteer, and the men and women he meets in Italy with total conviction. But A Farewell to Arms is not only a novel of war. In it, Hemingway has also created a love story of immense drama and uncompromising passion. An utter classic, which your sons and daughters will adore.
 
3 – White Teeth – Zadie Smith
 
This eminently readable novel tells the story of the intersection of three families of varying ethnic and cultural backgrounds in the recent past in London. It is a postmodern novel above all else, but its warmth, simplicity of language make it a page turner and suitable for young and old.
 
4 – The Little Stranger – Sarah Waters
 
One postwar summer in his home of rural Warwickshire, Dr. Faraday, the son of a maid who has built a life of quiet respectability as a country physician, is called to a patient at lonely Hundreds Hall. Home to the Ayres family for over two centuries, the Georgian house, once impressive and handsome, is now in decline, its masonry crumbling, its gardens choked with weeds, the clock in its stable yard permanently fixed at twenty to nine. Its owners—mother, son, and daughter—are struggling to keep pace with a changing society, as well as with conflicts of their own. But are the Ayreses haunted by something more sinister than a dying way of life? Little does Dr. Faraday know how closely, and how terrifyingly, their story is about to become intimately entwined with his. Be forewarned! This book is not for students who scare easily!
 
5 – Tales of HP Lovecraft – H.P Lovecraft
 
When he died in 1937, destitute and emotionally and physically ruined. H.P. Lovecraft had no idea that he would come to be regarded as the godfather of the modern horror genre, nor that his work would influence an entire generation of writers, including Stephen King and Anne Rice. Now, at last, the most important tales of this distinctive American genious are gathered in one volume by National Book Award-winning author Joyce Carol Oates.

Combining the nineteenth-century gothic sesibility of Edgar Allan Poe with a daring internal vision, Lovecraft's tales foretold a psychically troubled century to come. Set in a meticulously described, historically grounded New England landscape, his harrowing stories explore the collapse of sanity beneath the weight of chaotic events. Lovecraft's universe is a frightening shadow world where reality and nightmare intertwine, and redemption can come only from below. In her preceptive and penetrating introduction, Oates, herself a virtuoso of the Gothic style, explains how Lovecraft's singular talents fused the supernatural and mundane into a terrifying complex, exquisitely realized vision.
 

English Department