Independent Study – Suggested Reading List
Note: Other novel suggestions may be considered. Teacher approval must be
given. You may not choose a novel that you have already studied, or analyzed in
an essay, for another class. You might like to choose another novel by the same
author.
The Other Side of the Bridge – Mary Lawson (Daisy/Mulhall)
 From the author of the beloved #1 national bestseller Crow Lake comes an
exceptional new novel of jealously, rivalry and the dangerous power of
obsession.
Two brothers, Arthur and Jake Dunn, are the sons of a farmer in the mid-1930s,
when life is tough and another world war is looming. Arthur is reticent, solid,
dutiful and set to inherit the farm and his father’s character; Jake is younger,
attractive, mercurial and dangerous to know – the family misfit. When a
beautiful young woman comes into the community, the fragile balance of sibling
rivalry tips over the edge.
Then there is Ian, the family’s next generation, and far too sure he knows the
difference between right and wrong. By now it is the fifties, and the world has
changed – a little, but not enough.
These two generations in the small town of Struan, Ontario, are tragically
interlocked, linked by fate and community but separated by a war which devours
its young men – its unimaginable horror reaching right into the heart of this
remote corner of an empire. With her astonishing ability to turn the ratchet of
tension slowly and delicately, Lawson builds their story to a shocking climax.
Taut with apprehension, surprising us with moments of tenderness and humour,
The Other Side of the Bridge is a compelling, humane and vividly evoked novel
with an irresistible emotional undertow.
Rush Home Road – Lori Lansens
 Heartbreaking and wise, Rush Home Road tells the life story of Adelaide Shadd,
who finds redemption in old age, and Sharla, a five-year-old mixed race girl
abandoned to Addy’s care by her white mother. Born in the first decade of the
20th century in Rusholme (inspired by the real town of Buxton), in southwestern
Ontario, an all-black community settled by fugitive slaves, Addy Shadd is raped
as a teenager and forced to flee the family home. She makes her way on foot to
Detroit, where she becomes the housekeeper for an elderly man and his grown
son, both of whom develop a crush on her. When misfortune strikes again, she
sets off to make a new life for herself in Canada. Thrown off the train at Keating,
not far from her birthplace, she meets and eventually marries the train porter,
the wonderful Mose, with whom she has a daughter. But when tragedy strikes,
Addy is left alone.
Now an old woman, she lives a quiet existence in a trailer park near Chatham.
Her whole world changes when a young mother asks her to babysit her
daughter, as it soon becomes clear that the mother is never coming back. Addy
is glad of the company, but not sure if she’s up to the job of mothering this
sweet, awkward five-year-old. Nor is she sure how much longer she’ll be around
to do so. How she manages is part of the story of this brilliantly captivating
novel.
Written with verve, grace and unflinching emotional acuity, Rush Home Road is
an epic story that explodes our notions of identity, justice, and heroism,
penetrating one of our darkest periods with profound insight and humanity.
Addy Shadd is a protagonist like no other -- full of quiet, steely bravery and
tenderness of heart. This spellbinding novel will leave no reader untouched.
A Northern Light – Jennifer Donnelly (e-audiobook/Mulhall)
 Mattie Gokey has a word for everything. She collects words, stores them up as a
way of fending off the hard truths of her life, the truths that she can't write
down in stories.
The fresh pain of her mother's death. The burden of raising her sisters while her
father struggles over his brokeback farm. The mad welter of feelings Mattie has
for handsome but dull Royal Loomis, who says he wants to marry her. And the
secret dreams that keep her going--visions of finishing high school, going to
college in New York City, becoming a writer.
Yet when the drowned body of a young woman turns up at the hotel where
Mattie works, all her words are useless. But in the dead woman's letters, Mattie
again finds her voice, and a determination to live her own life.
Set in 1906 against the backdrop of the murder that inspired Theodore Dreiser's
An American Tragedy, this coming-of-age novel effortlessly weaves romance,
history, and a murder mystery into something moving, and real, and wholly
original.
A Thousand Splendid Suns – Khaled Hosseini (e-audiobook; audiobook on
CD/Mulhall)
 A Thousand Splendid Suns is a breathtaking story set against the volatile events
of Afghanistan’s last thirty years—from the Soviet invasion to the reign of the
Taliban to the post-Taliban rebuilding—that puts the violence, fear, hope, and
faith of this country in intimate, human terms. It is a tale of two generations of
characters brought jarringly together by the tragic sweep of war, where personal
lives—the struggle to survive, raise a family, find happiness—are inextricable
from the history playing out around them.
Propelled by the same storytelling instinct that made The Kite Runner a beloved
classic, A Thousand Splendid Suns is at once a remarkable chronicle of three
decades of Afghan history and a deeply moving account of family and friendship.
It is a striking, heart-wrenching novel of an unforgiving time, an unlikely
friendship, and an indestructible love—a stunning accomplishment
The Secret Life of Bees – Sue Monk Kidd (Kurzweil/W-Ross)

Set in South Carolina in 1964, The Secret Life of Bees tells the story of Lily
Owens, whose life has been shaped around the blurred memory of the afternoon
her mother was killed.
When Lily's fierce-hearted black "stand-in mother," Rosaleen, insults three of
the town's most vicious racists, Lily decides they should both escape to Tiburon,
South Carolina—a town that holds the secret to her mother's past. There they
are taken in by an eccentric trio of black beekeeping sisters who introduce Lily
to a mesmerizing world of bees, honey, and the Black Madonna who presides
over their household. This is a remarkable story about divine female power and
the transforming power of love—a story that women will share and pass on to
their daughters for years to come.
Away – Jane Urquhart
 A stunning, evocative novel set in Ireland and Canada, Away traces a family’s
complex and layered past. The narrative unfolds with shimmering clarity, and
takes us from the harsh northern Irish coast in the 1840s to the quarantine
stations at Grosse Isle and the barely hospitable land of the Canadian Shield;
from the flourishing town of Port Hope to the flooded streets of Montreal; from
Ottawa at the time of Confederation to a large-windowed house at the edge of a
Great Lake during the present day. Graceful and moving, Away unites the
personal and the political as it explores the most private, often darkest corners
of our emotions where the things that root us to ourselves endure. Powerful,
intricate, lyrical, Away is an unforgettable novel.
The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood (e-audiobook/Mulhall)
 It is the world of the near future, and Offred is a Handmaid in the home of the
Commander and his wife. She is allowed out once a day to the food market, she
is not permitted to read, and she is hoping the Commander makes her pregnant,
because she is only valued if her ovaries are viable. Offred can remember the
years before, when she was an independent woman, had a job of her own, a
husband and child. But all of that is gone now...everything has changed.
Oryx and Crake – Margaret Atwood (Daisy/W-Ross) (e-audiobook/Mulhall)
 Margaret Atwood’s new novel is so utterly compelling, so prescient, so relevant,
so terrifyingly-all-too-likely-to-be-true, that readers may find their view of the
world forever changed after reading it. This is Margaret Atwood at the absolute
peak of her powers. For readers of Oryx and Crake, nothing will ever look the
same again.
The narrator of Atwood's riveting novel calls himself Snowman. When the story
opens, he is sleeping in a tree, wearing an old bedsheet, mourning the loss of
his beloved Oryx and his best friend Crake, and slowly starving to death. He
searches for supplies in a wasteland where insects proliferate and pigoons and
wolvogs ravage the pleeblands, where ordinary people once lived, and the
Compounds that sheltered the extraordinary. As he tries to piece together what
has taken place, the narrative shifts to decades earlier. How did everything fall
apart so quickly? Why is he left with nothing but his haunting memories? Alone
except for the green-eyed Children of Crake, who think of him as a kind of
monster, he explores the answers to these questions in the double journey he
takes - into his own past, and back to Crake's high-tech bubble-dome, where
the Paradice Project unfolded and the world came to grief.
With breathtaking command of her shocking material, and with her customary
sharp wit and dark humour, Atwood projects us into an outlandish yet wholly
believable realm populated by characters who will continue to inhabit our
dreams long after the last chapter.
Ender’s Game – Orson Scott Card (CD, Audio/W-Ross) (e-audiobook;
audiobook on CD/Mulhall)
 In order to develop a secure defense against a hostile alien race's next attack,
government agencies breed child geniuses and train them as soldiers. A brilliant
young boy, Andrew "Ender" Wiggin lives with his kind but distant parents, his
sadistic brother Peter, and the person he loves more than anyone else, his sister
Valentine. Peter and Valentine were candidates for the soldier-training program
but didn't make the cut--young Ender is the Wiggin drafted to the orbiting Battle
School for rigorous military training.
Ender's skills make him a leader in school and respected in the Battle Room,
where children play at mock battles in zero gravity. Yet growing up in an
artificial community of young soldiers, Ender suffers greatly from isolation,
rivalry from his peers, pressure from the adult teachers, and an unsettling fear
of the alien invaders. His psychological battles include loneliness, fear that he is
becoming like the cruel brother he remembers, and fanning the flames of
devotion to his beloved sister.
Is Ender the general Earth needs? But Ender is not the only result of the genetic
experiments. The war with the Buggers has been raging for a hundred years,
and the quest for the perfect general has been underway for almost as long.
Ender's two older siblings are every bit as unusual as he is, but in very different
ways. Between the three of them lie the abilities to remake a world. If the world
survives, that is.
The Poisonwood Bible – Barbara Kingsolver (e-audiobook; audiobook on
CD/Mulhall)
 The Poisonwood Bible is a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan
Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the
Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will
need from home, but soon find that all of it -- from garden seeds to Scripture -is calamitously transformed on African soil. What follows is a suspenseful epic of
one family's tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the course of
three decades in postcolonial Africa.
Three Day Road – Joseph Boyden (Kurzweil, Daisy/W-Ross) (eaudiobook/Mulhall)
 It is 1919, and Niska, the last Oji-Cree woman to live off the land, has received word
that one of the two boys she saw off to the Great War has returned. Xavier Bird, her
sole living relation, is gravely wounded and addicted to morphine. As Niska slowly
paddles her canoe on the three-day journey to bring Xavier home, travelling through the
stark but stunning landscape of Northern Ontario, their respective stories emerge—
stories of Niska’s life among her kin and of Xavier’s horrifying experiences in the killing
fields of Ypres and the Somme.
The Book of Negroes – Lawrence Hill (Daisy/W-Ross) (Daisy/Mulhall)
 Abducted as an 11-year-old child from her village in West Africa and forced to walk for
months to the sea in a coffle?a string of slaves? Aminata Diallo is sent to live as a slave
in South Carolina. But years later, she forges her way to freedom, serving the British in
the Revolutionary War and registering her name in the historic ?Book of Negroes.? This
book, an actual document, provides a short but immensely revealing record of freed
Loyalist slaves who requested permission to leave the US for resettlement in Nova
Scotia, only to find that the haven they sought was steeped in an oppression all of its
own.
The Red Tent – Anita Diamant (audiobook on CD/Mulhall)

Her name is Dinah. In the Bible, her life is only hinted at in a brief and violent detour
within the more familiar chapters of the Book of Genesis that are about her father,
Jacob, and his dozen sons. Told in Dinah's voice, this novel reveals the traditions and
turmoils of ancient womanhood--the world of the red tent. It begins with the story of her
mothers--Leah, Rachel, Zilpah, and Bilhah--the four wives of Jacob. They love Dinah and
give her gifts that sustain her through a hard-working youth, a calling to midwifery, and
a new home in a foreign land. Dinah's story reaches out from a remarkable period of
early history and creates an intimate connection with the past. Deeply affecting, The Red
Tent combines rich storytelling with a valuable achievement in modern fiction: a new
view of biblical women's society.
Vanishing Acts – Jodi Picoult (audiobook on CD/Mulhall)
 Delia Hopkins has led a charmed life. Raised in rural New Hampshire by her beloved,
widowed father, she now has a young daughter, a handsome fiance, and her own
search-and-rescue bloodhound, which she uses to find missing persons. But as Delia
plans her wedding, she is plagued by flashbacks of a life she can't recall...until a
policeman knocks on her door, revealing a secret about herself that changes the world
as she knows it -- and threatens to jeopardize her future. With Vanishing Acts, Jodi
Picoult explores how life -- as we know it -- might not turn out the way we imagined;
how the people we've loved and trusted can suddenly change before our very eyes; how
the memory we thought had vanished could return as a threat. Once again, Picoult
handles an astonishing and timely topic with under-standing, insight, and compassion.
White Oleander – Janet Finch

Everywhere hailed as a novel of rare beauty and power, White Oleander tells the
unforgettable story of Ingrid, a brilliant poet imprisoned for murder, and her daughter,
Astrid, whose odyssey through a series of Los Angeles foster homes-each its own
universe, with its own laws, its own dangers, its own hard lessons to be learnedbecomes a redeeming and surprising journey of self-discovery.
Stones from the River – Ursula Hegi

From the author of Floating in My Mother's Palm. Born in the small German town of
Burdorf, Trudi Montag is a Zwerg--a dwarf--who yearns to stretch and grow and be like
everyone else. But as she matures to become the town's librarian and unofficial
historian, Trudi learns that being different is a secret that everybody shares.
Cape Breton Road – D. R. MacDonald (audiobook on CD – currently
missing/Mulhall)
 Innis Corbett was born in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, into a Highlander community whose
inhabitants are held by ties of memory and blood. But as a small child he moves to
Boston with his father and mother. Tragedy strikes when his father is killed by a car and
Innis is left in the sole care of his mother who has a weakness for men and sometimes
for drink. When Innis gets in trouble with the law over a series of car thefts (he has a
liking for fancy cars and pot), he is deported to Canada, a punishment, to him, worse
than going to prison.
Innis goes to live with his bachelor uncle, Starr, in rural Cape Breton, in the rugged
landscape that had shaped three generations of his family. Inspired and challenged by
this environment, he takes refuge in the wild, dense woods, where he devises a plan to
grow pot. His new venture helps assuage his loneliness and gives him something to care
for, a secret of his own. Then Claire, an attractive woman nearing 40 enters the Corbett
household. So begins an entanglement that leads to suspicion, jealousy, and ultimately
to violence.
Cape Breton Road is an exceptional first novel by a writer with an unerring eye for
tragedy that seems to grow from the soil.
The Birth House – Amy McKay (e-audiobook/Mulhall)
 The Birth House is the story of Dora Rare, the first daughter to be born in five
generations of Rares. As a child in an isolated village in Nova Scotia, she is drawn to
Miss Babineau, an outspoken Acadian midwife with a gift for healing. Dora becomes Miss
B.’s apprentice, and together they help the women of Scots Bay through infertility,
difficult labours, breech births, unwanted pregnancies and even unfulfilling sex lives.
Filled with details as compelling as they are surprising, The Birth House is an
unforgettable tale of the struggles women have faced to have control of their own bodies
and to keep the best parts of tradition alive in the world of modern medicine.
A Complicated Kindness – Miriam Toews (audiobook on CD/Mulhall)
 Sixteen-year-old Nomi Nickel longs to hang out with Lou Reed and Marianne Faithfull in
New York City’s East Village. Instead she’s trapped in East Village, Manitoba, a small
town whose population is Mennonite: “the most embarrassing sub-sect of people to
belong to if you’re a teenager.” East Village is a town with no train and no bar whose job
prospects consist of slaughtering chickens at the Happy Family Farms abattoir or
churning butter for tourists at the pioneer village. Ministered with an iron fist by Nomi’s
uncle Hans, a.k.a. The Mouth of Darkness, East Village is a town that’s tall on rules and
short on fun: no dancing, drinking, rock ’n’ roll, recreational sex, swimming, make-up,
jewellery, playing pool, going to cities or staying up past nine o’clock.
As the novel begins, Nomi struggles to cope with the back-to-back departures three
years earlier of Tash, her beautiful and mouthy sister, and Trudie, her warm and spirited
mother. She lives with her father, Ray, a sweet yet hapless schoolteacher whose love is
unconditional but whose parenting skills amount to benign neglect. Father and daughter
deal with their losses in very different ways. Ray, a committed elder of the church, seeks
to create an artificial sense of order by reorganizing the city dump late at night. Nomi,
on the other hand, favours chaos as she tries to blunt her pain through “drugs and
imagination.” Together they live in a limbo of unanswered questions.
Nomi’s first person narrative shifts effortlessly between the present and the past. Within
the present, Nomi goes through the motions of finishing high school while flagrantly
rebelling against Mennonite tradition. She hangs out on Suicide Hill, hooks up with a boy
named Travis, goes on the Pill, wanders around town, skips class and cranks Led
Zeppelin. But the past is never far from her mind as she remembers happy times with
her mother and sister — as well as the painful events that led them to flee town.
Throughout, in a voice both defiant and vulnerable, she offers hilarious and
heartbreaking reflections on life, death, family, faith and love.
Eventually Nomi’s grief — and a growing sense of hypocrisy — cause her to spiral ever
downward to a climax that seems at once startling and inevitable. But even when one
more loss is heaped on her piles of losses, Nomi maintains hope and finds the
imagination and willingness to envision what lies beyond.
The Help – Kathryn Stockett (Daisy/W-Ross) (Daisy; e-audiobook/Mulhall)
 Three ordinary women are about to take one extraordinary step.
Twenty-two-year-old Skeeter has just returned home after graduating from Ole
Miss. She may have a degree, but it is 1962, Mississippi, and her mother will not
be happy till Skeeter has a ring on her finger. Skeeter would normally find
solace with her beloved maid Constantine, the woman who raised her, but
Constantine has disappeared and no one will tell Skeeter where she has gone.
Aibileen is a black maid, a wise, regal woman raising her seventeenth white
child. Something has shifted inside her after the loss of her own son, who died
while his bosses looked the other way. She is devoted to the little girl she looks
after, though she knows both their hearts may be broken.
Minny, Aibileen's best friend, is short, fat, and perhaps the sassiest woman in
Mississippi. She can cook like nobody's business, but she can't mind her tongue,
so she's lost yet another job. Minny finally finds a position working for someone
too new to town to know her reputation. But her new boss has secrets of her
own.
Seemingly as different from one another as can be, these women will
nonetheless come together for a clandestine project that will put them all at
risk. And why? Because they are suffocating within the lines that define their
town and their times. And sometimes lines are made to be crossed.
The Book Thief – Markus Zusak (Kurzweil/W-Ross) (e-audiobook;
audiobook on CD/Mulhall)
 It’s just a small story really, about among other things: a girl, some words, an
accordionist, some fanatical Germans, a Jewish fist-fighter, and quite a lot of thievery. .
Set during World War II in Germany, Markus Zusak’s groundbreaking new novel is the
story of Liesel Meminger, a foster girl living outside of Munich. Liesel scratches out a
meager existence for herself by stealing when she encounters something she can’t
resist–books. With the help of her accordion-playing foster father, she learns to read and
shares her stolen books with her neighbors during bombing raids as well as with the
Jewish man hidden in her basement before he is marched to Dachau.
This is an unforgettable story about the ability of books to feed the soul.
Sarah’s Key – Tatiana de Rosnay

Paris, July 1942: Sarah, a ten year-old girl, is brutally arrested with her family by the
French police in the Vel’ d’Hiv’ roundup, but not before she locks her younger brother in
a cupboard in the family's apartment, thinking that she will be back within a few hours.
Paris, May 2002: On Vel’ d’Hiv’s 60th anniversary, journalist Julia Jarmond is asked to
write an article about this black day in France's past. Through her contemporary
investigation, she stumbles onto a trail of long-hidden family secrets that connect her
to Sarah. Julia finds herself compelled to retrace the girl's ordeal, from that terrible term
in the Vel d'Hiv', to the camps, and beyond. As she probes into Sarah's past, she begins
to question her own place in France, and to reevaluate her marriage and her life.