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Reading lists

Books to help cope with the heat

With the dawn of a new millennium about to break, the Nineties was a strange, floating decade of positivity, hope and something called the World Wide Web. 

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Books that defined the 2000s

8 empowering books about living through loss

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Abridged Edition

Penguin Readers Level 5: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (ELT Graded Reader)

Penguin Readers is an ELT graded reader series for learners of English as a foreign language. With carefully adapted text, new illustrations and language learning exercises, the print edition also includes instructions to access supporting material online. 
 
Titles include popular classics, exciting contemporary fiction, and thought-provoking non-fiction, introducing language learners to bestselling authors and compelling content. 
 
The eight levels of Penguin Readers follow the Common European Framework of Reference for language learning (CEFR). Exercises at the back of each Reader help language learners to practise grammar, vocabulary, and key exam skills. Before, during and after-reading questions test readers' story comprehension and develop vocabulary. 
 
Visit the Penguin Readers website 
Exclusively with the print edition, readers can unlock online resources including a digital book, audio edition, lesson plans and answer keys. 
 
Oskar Shell is a clever nine-year-old boy. When his father is killed in the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11th 2001, Oskar wants to learn the secret about a key that he discovers in his father's closet. His search takes him on a journey through New York and into the lives of strangers and relatives. But will it bring him any closer to his lost father?

Jonathan Safran Foer (Author) Jonathan Safran Foer is the author of Everything Is Illuminated, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Eating Animals and Here I Am. He has also edited a new modern edition of the sacred Jewish Haggadah. Everything Is Illuminated won several literary prizes, including the National Jewish Book Award and the Guardian First Book Award. He edited the anthology A Convergence of Birds: Original Fiction and Poetry Inspired by the Work of Joseph Cornell, and his stories have been published in the Paris Review, Conjunctions and the New Yorker. Jonathan Safran Foer teaches Creative Writing at New York University. Ladybird (Author) We make growing up the best story ever! Here at Ladybird, we publish playful books for little hands. From touch-and-feel books to bedtime stories and non-fiction, we help 0-7s to learn, play and grow - sparking plenty of smiles along the way. The home of Ten Minutes to Bed, Baby Touch, Peppa Pig and Hey Duggee, we know just how to capture curious little imaginations and guide them from one story to the next.

With carefully adapted text, new illustrations, language practise activities and additional online resources, the Penguin Readers series introduces language learners to bestselling authors and compelling content. Titles include popular classics, exciting contemporary fiction, and thought-provoking non-fiction. 
 
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, a Level 5 Reader, is B1 in the CEFR framework. The text is made up of sentences with up to four clauses, introducing present perfect continuous, past perfect, reported speech and second conditional. It is well supported by illustrations, which appear regularly. 
 
Oskar Shell is a clever nine-year-old boy. When his father is killed in the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11th 2001, Oskar wants to learn the secret about a key that he discovers in his father's closet. His search takes him on a journey through New York and into the lives of strangers and relatives. But will it bring him any closer to his lost father?

Eating Animals

To reduce risk of pandemics for ourselves, our gaze needs to turn to the health of animals. Discover Jonathan Safran Foer's eye-opening and life-changing account of the meat we eat. 
 
'Should be compulsory reading. A genuine masterwork. Read this book. It will change you' Time Out 
 
Eating Animals is the most original and urgent book on the subject of food written this century. It will change the way you think, and change the way you eat. For good. 
 
Whether you're flirting with veganuary, trying to cut back on animal consumption, or a lifelong meat-eater, you need to read this book. 
 
From the bestselling author of the essential book on animal agriculture and climate crisis: We are the Weather. 
 
'Shocking, incandescent, brilliant' The Times 
 
'Everyone who eats flesh should read this book' Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall 
 
'Universally compelling. Jonathan Safran Foer's book changed me' Natalie Portman 
 
'Gripping [and] original. A brilliant synthesis of argument, science and storytelling. One of the finest books ever written on the subject of eating animals' Times Literary Supplement 
 
'If you eat meat and fish, you should read this book. Even if you don't, you should. It might bring the beginning of a change of heart about all living things' Joanna Lumley

Jonathan Safran Foer is the author of Everything Is Illuminated, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Eating Animals and Here I Am. He has also edited a new modern edition of the sacred Jewish Haggadah. Everything Is Illuminated won several literary prizes, including the National Jewish Book Award and the Guardian First Book Award. He edited the anthology A Convergence of Birds: Original Fiction and Poetry Inspired by the Work of Joseph Cornell, and his stories have been published in the Paris Review, Conjunctions and the New Yorker. Jonathan Safran Foer teaches Creative Writing at New York University.

'I simply wanted to know - for myself and my family - what meat is. Where does it come from? How is it produced? What are the economic, social and environmental effects? Are there animals that it is straightforwardly right to eat? Are there situations in which not eating animals is wrong? If this began as a personal quest, it didn't stay that way for long . . . ' 
 
Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals is the most original book on the subject of food written this century. It will change the way you think, and change the way you eat. 
 
For good.

Here I Am

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER 
 
From the bestselling author of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Everything is Illuminated and We are the Weather - a rich and moving novel about modern family lives and the ties that bind 
 
'Towering and glorious: a tale of social, familial and marital breakdown and the End of the World. The funniest literary novel I have ever read' The Times 
 
'A rich, beautifully written, ambitious and grandly moving novel, which looks both at the world at large and at the deepest concerns of individual lives' Evening Standard 
 
'Lays bare the interior of a marriage with such intelligence and deep feeling and pitiless clarity, it's impossible to read it and not re-examine your own family' Time 
 
'Astonishing. So sad and so funny and so wry' Scotland on Sunday 
 
Jacob and Julia Bloch are about to be tested . . . 
 
By Jacob's grandfather, who won't go quietly into a retirement home. 
By the family reunion, that everyone is dreading. 
By their son's heroic attempts to get expelled. 
And by the sexting affair that will rock their marriage. 
 
A typical modern American family, the Blochs cling together even as they are torn apart. Which is when catastrophe decides to strike . . . 
 
Confronting the enduring question of what it means to be human with inventiveness, playfulness and compassion, Here I Am is a great American family novel for our times, an unmissable read for fans of Jonathan Franzen and Michael Chabon, a masterpiece about how we live now.

Publisher's description. The New York Times bestselling new novel from the author of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Wildly exhilarating and profoundly moving, this is the story of a man in crisis, a family imploding, a planet on the brink of disaster. Here I Am is a great American novel for our times, a masterpiece about how we live now.

Towering and glorious: a tale of social, familial and marital breakdown . . . and the End of the World.  The funniest literary novel I have ever read

An ambitious platter of intellection and emotion. Its observations are crisp; its intimations of doom resonate; its jokes are funny. Foer's best and most caustic novel, filled with so much pain and regret that your heart sometimes struggles to hold it all. Has more teeming life in it than several hundred well-meaning and well-reviewed books of midlist fiction put together

Foer writes like a dream. . . big-hearted, courageous and jaw-droppingly clever

Foer has stretched and expanded the possibilities of the novel without losing either intellectual integrity or emotional honesty. Here I Am is not just bold, it is brave... It will be remembered when all the dinner party novels are long forgotten

Highly enjoyable and extremely funny... Foer is an absolute master of his fictional universe

Emotional depth and dramatic maturity... Unarguably Foer's most substantial and impressive work yet

Lays bare the interior of a marriage with such intelligence and deep feeling and pitiless clarity, it's impossible to read it and not re-examine your own family.

Provocative . . . very, very funny. Dialogue pings, as animated and inventive as an Aaron Sorkin script.

Terrific, truthful, extremely funny and heartbreaking.

A rich, beautifully written, ambitious and grandly moving novel, which looks both at the world at large and at the deepest concerns of individual lives.

Astonishing. So sad and so funny and so wry. The book that The Corrections ought to have been

Jacob and Julia Bloch have a problem. While they've been coaxing Jacob's grandfather into a retirement home, bracing themselves for a family reunion, and struggling to keep their eldest son from being expelled, a discovery is made that risks destroying their marriage. And as domestic crises multiply in the foreground, a global disaster is looming on the horizon... 
 
Confronting the enduring question of what it means to be human with inventiveness, irreverence and compassion, Here I Am is a great American novel for our times, a masterpiece about how we live now.

Everything is Illuminated

Jonathan Safran Foer's bestselling debut novel, published as a Penguin Essential for the first time

THE INTERNATIONALLY BESTSELLING NOVEL 
 
ADAPTED INTO A FEATURE FILM WITH ELIJAH WOOD 
 
From the bestselling author of Here I Am, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and We are the Weather - a hilarious, life-affirming and utterly original novel about the search for truth - now available as a pocket-sized Penguin Essential 
 
'Gripping, hilariously funny and deeply serious. An astonishing feat of writing' The Times 
 
'One of the most impressive novel debuts of recent years' Joyce Carol Oates, Times Literary Supplement 
 
'A first novel of startling originality' Jay McInerney, Observer 
 
'It seems hard to believe that such a young writer can have such a deep understanding of both comedy and tragedy' Erica Wagner, The Times 
 
A young man arrives in the Ukraine, clutching in his hand a tattered photograph. He is searching for the woman who fifty years ago saved his grandfather from the Nazis. Unfortunately, he is aided in his quest by Alex, a translator with an uncanny ability to mangle English into bizarre new forms; a "blind" old man haunted by memories of the war; and an undersexed guide dog named Sammy Davis Jr, Jr. What they are looking for seems elusive -- a truth hidden behind veils of time, language and the horrors of war. 
 
What they find turns all their worlds upside down...

A young man arrives in the Ukraine, clutching in his hand a tattered photograph.  He is searching for the woman who fifty years ago saved his grandfather from the Nazis. Unfortunately, he is aided in his quest by Alex, a translator with an uncanny ability to mangle English into bizarre new forms; a "blind" old man haunted by memories of the war; and an undersexed guide dog named Sammy Davis Jr, Jr.  What they are looking for seems elusive -- a truth hidden behind veils of time, language and the horrors of war. What they find turns all their worlds upside down.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

The wildly inventive and powerfully moving follow-up to the acclaimed and award-winning Everything Is Illuminated.

THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER 
 
ADAPTED INTO A FEATURE FILM WITH TOM HANKS 
 
From the critically acclaimed author of Here I Am, Everything is Illuminated and We are the Weather - a heartrending and unforgettable novel set in the aftermath of the 9/11 
 
'Utterly engaging, hugely involving, tragic, funny and intensely moving... A heartbreaker' Spectator 
 
'The most incredible fictional nine-year-old ever created... a funny, heart-rending portrayal of a child coping with disaster. It will have you biting back the tears' Glamour 
 
'Pulsates with dazzling ideas' Times Literary Supplement 
 
'It's a miracle... So impeccably imagined, so courageously executed, so everlastingly moving' Baltimore Sun 
 
'Jonathan Safran Foer is a writer of considerable brilliance' Observer 
 
In a vase in a closet, a couple of years after his father died in 9/11, nine-year-old Oskar discovers a key... 
 
The key belonged to his father, he's sure of that. But which of New York's 162 million locks does it open? 
 
So begins a quest that takes Oskar - inventor, letter-writer and amateur detective - across New York's five boroughs and into the jumbled lives of friends, relatives and complete strangers. He gets heavy boots, he gives himself little bruises and he inches ever nearer to the heart of a family mystery that stretches back fifty years. But will it take him any closer to, or even further from, his lost father?

Nine-year-old Oskar Schell is an inventor, amateur entomologist, Francophile, letter writer, pacifist, natural historian, percussionist, romantic, Great Explorer, jeweller, detective, vegan, and collector of butterflies. 
 
When his father is killed in the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Centre, Oskar sets out to solve the mystery of a key he disovers in his father's closet. It is a search which leads him into the lives of strangers, through the five boroughs of New York, into history, to the bombings of Dresden and Hiroshima, and on an inward journey which brings him ever closer to some kind of peace.

Jonathan Safran Foer

Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast

Most books about the environmental crisis are densely academic, depressingly doom-laden and crammed with impersonal statistics. We are the Weather is different - accessible, immediate and with a single clear solution that individual readers can put into practice straight away. 
 
A significant proportion of global carbon emissions come from farming meat. Giving up meat is incredibly hard and nobody is perfect - but just cutting back is much easier and still has a huge positive effect on the environment. Cutting out meat for just part of the day is enough to change the world. 
 
With his distinctive wit, insight and humanity, Foer frames this essential debate as no one else could, bringing it to vivid and urgent life.

Jonathan Safran Foer

We are the Weather

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