Dr. Steven Van Zoost
Nova Scotia Virtual School
www.stevenvanzoost.com
Advanced English 11 Novels Study List
A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry. A Fine Balance is a magnificent novel that captures the cruelty, corruption, dignity and heroism of India. It is 1975 and a State of Emergency is declared, thrusting four strangers—a spirited widow, a young student, and two tailors—together to share one cramped apartment and an uncertain future. An enduring panorama of the human spirit is created as the characters move from distrust to friendship, from friendship to love.
Not Wanted on the Voyage - Timothy Findley. Not Wanted on the Voyage is a retelling of the story about Noah's Ark. With magic and mythology, this acclaimed novel turns the original story upside down. Noah is the bad guy while Lucifer is presented as a force for good. NOTE: Caution regarding some explicit sexual content.
The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown. The Da Vinci Code is a lightning-paced, intelligent thriller. Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon works to solve the enigmatic riddle found by the murdered body of the Louvre's curator. He is stunned to discover it leads to a trail of clues hidden in the works of Da Vinci, ingeniously disguised by the painter. Langdon joins forces with a gifted French cryptologist, Sophie Neveu, and together they race through Paris, London, and beyond, to decipher the labyrinthine puzzle before an explosive historical truth is lost forever.
A Complicated Kindness - Miriam Toews. A Complicated Kindness is the story of sixteen-year-old Nomi Nickel who is trapped in East Village, Manitoba, a small town whose population is Mennonite. Ministered with an iron fist by Nomi’s uncle, Hans, it is a town that’s tall on rules and short on fun. More importantly, it is the story of this young girl's relationship with her father as they both struggle to deal with the abandonment of her mother and sister three years earlier. In a voice that is both defiant and vulnerable, this novel offers hilarious and heartbreaking reflections on life, death, family, faith and love.
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley. Brave New World is a racy narrative that is full of satire and literary horseplay. It is a fantasy of the future that sheds a critical light on the present.
Dune - Frank Herbert. Dune is the first book in a series. When his father's government is overthrown, Paul Atreides is forced to live in exile with his family on the planet of Dune.
House of Sand and Fog - Andre Dubus III. House of Sand and Fog is the riveting story of three fragile yet determined people—Colonel Behrani, a struggling immigrant who was once very wealthy; Kathy Nicolo, a troubled young woman whose house is all she has left; and Sheriff Lester Burdon, a married man in love with Kathy—who become dangerously entangled in a relentlessly escalating crisis. Drawn together to the same house in the California hills and doomed by their inability to understand one another, the three personalities collide.
I Know This Much Is True - Wally Lamb. I Know This Much Is True is the complex and powerful novel about the search for self-acceptance of a 40-year-old housepainter named Dominick Birdsey, from a spectacularly dysfunctional family. It is a spellbinding masterpiece of responsibility and family, betrayal and redemption.
Maus: A Survivor's Tale - Art Spielgelman. Maus: A Survivor's Tale is a unique and powerful tale of a Holocaust survivor seen through the art and words of his son, America's leading avant-garde cartoonist.
Oryx and Crake - Margaret Atwood. Oryx and Crake follows the fortunes of Snowman, a man once called Jimmy. It is the story of his life as a scavenger intermingled with memories of his past. On a website featuring child pornography, he encounters Oryx, an eponymous Asian girl, and thrown into the mix is Crake, a brilliantly gifted childhood friend and scientist who creates artificial life. Some mature content.
Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return (Volume II) - Marjane Satrapi. Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return (Volume II) is the humorous and heartbreaking sequel to "Persepolis." This insightful memoir presented in comic strip format is an engaging coming-of-age story set in the Middle East.
Sylvanus Now - Donna Morrissey. Sylvanus Now is set in Newfoundland during the 1950s. It is the story of a young fisherman, Sylvanus Now, whose desire is simple—to suit the beautiful Adelaide by catching the required number of fish to do so. However, Adelaide's dream of escaping the sea, the fish, and the community puts Sylvanus' strong desire of independence and love of the sea into question.
The Many Lives and Sorrows of Josephine B. - Sandra Gulland. The Many Lives and Sorrows of Josephine B. is the first of three books inspired by the life of Josephine Bonaparte, wife of Napoleon, and one of the most powerful women in history. With pre-revolutionary Paris as a backdrop, the novel is a gripping story of love and political intrigue.
The Mayor of Casterbridge - Thomas Hardy. The Mayor of Casterbridge is a novel praised for its realism and poetic style. Set in a rural English community, it is the story of a cruel joke that goes too far when a drunken laborer auctions off his wife and child at the country fair.
The Red Tent - Anita Diamant. The Red Tent is a novel that reveals the traditions and turmoil of ancient womanhood—the world of the red tent. It is the story of Dinah and how the love of her mothers gave her gifts that sustained her through a hard-working youth, a calling to midwifery, and a new home in a foreign land. Dinah's story is a remarkable view of biblical women's society.
Blindness - Jose Saramago. Blindness tells a fantastic tale about a city hit by an epidemic of "white blindness" that spares no one. Confined to an empty mental hospital, the criminal element holds everyone captive. A magnificent parable of loss and disorientation, "Blindness" is the story of one man's will to survive against all odds. Some mature content.
Crow Lake - Mary Lawson. Crow Lake is a tale of love, death, and redemption set in a rural northern community where time has stood still. The Morrison children hope to escape the isolation and destitution through the blessings of education. These dreams are dashed for the boys with the tragic accidental death of both parents and a life-altering change of events. Successful is Kate, who achieves a doctorate and becomes a microbiologist. Accustomed to dissecting organisms under a microscope, she must now analyse her own emotional life as this universal drama of family love and misunderstandings unfolds.
Disgrace - J. M. Coetzee. Disgrace takes place in South Africa after apartheid. It is the story of a middle-aged professor whose world crumbles due to technology. After a series of degrading misadventures, he ends up on his daughter's farm. There, after further disgraces including disfigurement, he finds reconciliation by caring for animals and the kinship that develops between them.
East of Eden - John Steinbeck. East of Eden is John Steinbeck's saga of a huge family based on the book of Genesis. It is set in the Salinas Valley. The story begins with the purchase of rich California farmland by Samuel Hamilton, an Irish immigrant and then traces the turbulent lives of this family from the Civil War to the end of World War I.
Ender's Game - Orson Scott Card. In Ender's Game government agencies breed child geniuses and train them as soldiers. The brilliant skills of young Andrew "Ender" Wiggin make him a leader in school and a highly respected warrior in the Battle Room. But, 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. Will Ender be the general Earth needs?
Fugitive Pieces - Jade Michaels. Fugitive Pieces is the story of Jakob Beer, a fugitive from World War II Poland. The novel explores his journey of transportation to a Greek island, and then to Toronto. Through it, Jakob learns how language has the power to restore, as well as destroy.
Life of Pi - Yann Martel. Life of Pi is a superb novel, both for its story and for its rich examinations of religion, isolation, and love. It has a plot that stretches the limits of credibility into new and exciting shapes. Pi is Piscine Molitor Patel, an intelligent, unusual boy from Pondicherry, one of the few Indian towns to be colonized by France. Pi's family decides to sell their animals to zoos in the United States and emigrate to Canada. Crossing the Pacific, they are shipwrecked. Pi survives on a boat through the interdependence of its passengers—an injured zebra, a spotted hyena, an orangutan, and a Bengal tiger.
Like Water for Chocolate - Laura Esquirel. Like Water for Chocolate is a novel peppered with recipes, remedies, and folky digressions. Tita, the youngest of three Mexican daughters, is expected to devote her life to her widowed mother. Thus, when Pedro asks for her hand in marriage, he is denied and offered the hand of older sister, Rosaura. Pedro accepts in hopes of living close to Tita, but she is unaware of his intentions. Some mature content.
Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden. Memoirs of a Geisha is the story of Sayuri, one of Japan's most celebrated geisha, a woman who is both performer and courtesan, slave and goddess. The novel follows Sayuri from her childhood in an impoverished fishing village to a representative of a geisha house to Gion, the pleasure district of Kyoto. During the years, she is schooled in music and dance, and learns the ways of a geisha. With resourcefulness and determination, Sayuri survives the intrigues of her trade and the upheavals of war.
Beloved - Toni Morrison. Beloved is a magnificent novel that shares the unimaginable experience of slavery. It is the story of a mother who kills her own daughter, Beloved, with a handsaw to prevent her from being claimed as a slave. Twenty years later Beloved returns to her mother as a ghost.
Dracula - Bram Stoker. Dracula is Bram Stoker's classic of horror and suspense. It is the bizarre tale of a Carpathian count, who drinks human blood to stay alive, and the Englishman who knows.
Frankenstein - Mary Shelley. Mary Shelley's version of Frankenstein tells an interesting tale about a scientist, Victor Frankenstein, who creates a fierce monster when he intends to create a new species resembling an ultimate human being.
Livyers World - Robin McGrath. Livyers World tales place in New Labrador that has evolved from the devastation of the Y2K Bug by adopting the code of the Anatsiaq, an elderly Inuk whose traditions and customs have helped the survivors manage without modern technology. When, as part of a speculative history lesson, Viddy is watching a fox kill a rabbit in virtual reality and things get out of hand, he is unable to escape the program or the limitations of Livyers World. Trapped in this alternate universe, Viddy pairs up with a young courier called Saan, and together they try to solve some of the problems that plague this Utopian society.
Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood (Volume I) - Marjane Satrapi. Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood (Volume I) is the wise, funny, and heartbreaking memoir of a precocious preteen growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution. The graceful black-and-white comics apply a childlike sensibility to the bleak lowlights of this time in the history of Iran.
Wuthering Heights, A Longman Cultural Edition - Alison Booth [editor]. Wuthering Heights, A Longman Cultural Edition presents this classic story in provocative and illuminating context. Besides the complete literary work, this resource is supplemented with helpful annotations and contextual materials that reveal conversations and controversies of its historical time.
Advanced English 12 Novels Study Lists
20000 leagues under the sea (Verne)
A fine balance (Mistry)
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
A million little pieces
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
A student of weather
A thousand splendid suns
A thread of grace
Alias Grace
Anna Karenina
Asta’s Book
At the mountain of madness
Barney’s Version
Bloodletting and miraculous cures
Breath, eyes, memory
Catcher in the rye (Salinger)
Clara Callan (Wright)
Cloud Atlas
Colony of unrequited dreams (Johnston)
Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister
Dante’s Inferno
David Suzuki: The Autobiography
Day
DeNiro’s Game
Diviners (Laurence)
Downhill ChanceDracula (Stoker)
Each Man’s Son
Emma
Emma (Austen)
Everything Is Illuminated
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
Famous Last Words
Frankenstein (Shelley)
Fugitive Pieces
Funny Boy
Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture
Girl, Interrupted
Hamlet
In Cold Blood
Jane Eyre (Bronte)
JPod
Jude the obscure (Hardy)
Kane and Abel
Kidnapped (Stevenson)
Lady Oracle (Atwood)
Lord of the Flies
Mansfield Park
Midwives
Moments of Being
Moral disorder
Mountain and the Valley
My sister’s keeper
Natasha and Other Stories
Never Let Me Go
Night
No great mischief (Macleod)
No Logo
Northanger Abbey (Austen)
Not Without Laughter
One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich
One flew over the cockoo’s nest
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Othello
Paula
Persuasion
Persuasion (Austen)
Pride and Prejudice
Pursuit of Happyness
Random Passage
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Red China Blues
River thieves (Crummey)
Running with Scissors
Sailors, slackers, and blind pigs
Sarum
Saving Fish From Drowning
Scarlet letter (Hawthorne)
Sense and Sensibility
Snow
Snow Flower and the Secret Fan
Sophie’s World
Steppenwolf (Hesse)
Still Life with Woodpecker
Stones
Suite Francaise
Sylvanus Now
Tales of Passion, Tales of Woe
Tess of the d’Urbervilles (Hardy)
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Attack
The Beothuk sag (Assiniwi)
The Birth House
The Birth of Venus
The book of Eve
The chosen (Potok)
The colony of unrequited dreams
The cunning man (Davies)
The curious incident of the dog in the night-time
The Divine Ryans
The English patient (Ondaatje)
The Europeans (James)
The fountainhead (Rand)
The God of small things
The Great Gatsby
The Handmaid’s Tale
The hanging of Angelique
The hero’s walk (Badami)
The Illiad and the Oddysey
The In-between World of Vikram Lall
The Inheritance of Loss
The Last Crossing
The lives of girls and women
The long stretch
The Memory Keeper’s Daughter
The Mill on the Floss
The Navigator of New York
The Penelopiad—The Myth Of Penelope and Odysseus
The picture of Dorian Gray
The pillars of the earth (Follett)
The Poisonwood Bible
The polished hoe (Clarke)
The pursuit of happyness
The Razor’s Edge
The reddening path
The Road
The Shipping News
The sledding hill
The Sorrowing House
The space between us
The Stone Angel
The Swinging Bridge
The Thirteenth Tale
The torch (Penfield)
The town below (Lemelin)
The underpainter
The view from a kite
The Weather Makers
The women of Brewster’s Place
Thirty acres (Ringuet)
Three Day Road
Two solitudes (MacLennan)
Watership down (Adams)
We need to Talk about Kevin
Whylah Falls
Wicked—The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
Wuthering heights (Bronte)
Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance