Category Novels

This one breaks the Cinderella mould and has a cross-dressing prince take centre stage. A perfect foil to him is a poor dress designer with uncommon strength of character. The story begins in Paris where Sebastian, the crown prince of Belgium, is trying his best to hide a secret from everyone while his parents are busy looking for a bride for him. What’s his secret? By night, he dresses and behaves as the fashionable and alluring Lady Crystallia! Not because he is uncomfortable as a man but because it releases him from his royal trappings and allows him to experience complete freedom in an alternate identity. In Paris, he discovers Frances whose only passion in life is designing fashionable clothes. He promises her a decent pay and opportunities to create her own designs. Tempted, France accompanies him to Belgium as part of his staff. That’s when she learns about his secret. But she doesn’t care about it as long as she is given the freedom to design clothes. As the friendship between Sebastian and Frances deepens, they have to face tough questions. Can they go on living a lie? Frances decides that she cannot and leaves, Sebastian must choose between getting his best friend back and marrying a princess he does not know. The simple artwork adequately supports a delightful story.

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A Pulitzer prize-winning story told in two volume, “Maus” – a tale within a tale – is about a cartoonist’s troubled relationship with his father. The father, Vladek Spiegelman, is a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust. As the son begins to tell his father’s story, he realizes that his struggles are nothing compared to the ones his father survived. The children of those who survived one of the goriest events in recent history are affected in their own way.

The artwork speaks more than words can. In clever allegory, Nazis are given the form of cats, the Jews are mice, the Polish, pigs and the Americans, dogs. “Maus” is not a comfortable read. It is a raw and powerful experience, where the author explores the fear of death as well as the euphoria of survival that was the everyday reality for those in Hitler’s camps.

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The Graveyard Book is a children’s fantasy novel written by Neil Gaiman and published in 2008. The story follows the young life of a boy called Nobody Owens who is orphaned as a toddler when a man kills his entire family. Nobody is adopted by ghosts from the local graveyard who raise him in a world of vampires, werewolves, mummies, and ghouls, and teach him to use a variety of supernatural abilities.

After his family is murdered in their beds, a toddler, pursued by the murderer Jack, wanders into a graveyard. Ghosts and other supernatural residents of the cemetery protect and eventually agree to raise him as their own. They name him Nobody Owens. With a vampire as his guardian, Nobody (Bod, to his friends) lives, loves and learns in the graveyard, which is full of adventure and dangers but the safest place for the 10-year-old. Outside the graveyard, Bod will be a target for Jack, the murderer.

A team of renowned artists lend their signature styles to each vignette in this award-winning two-volume story by Neil Gaiman.

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Emmett Atwater is one of the 10 teens recruited by Babel Communications to participate in what is advertised as “the most serious space exploration”. It’s a very, very lucrative proposal: $50,000 a month for each participant – too tempting an offer for Emmett to refuse. With an aim to help out his family – including paying for his mother’s kidney transplant – Emmett signs on. He’s put on a mission to mine ‘nyxia’ or black gold, a valuable substance from planet Eden. Babel Communications is committed to finding the fittest survivor among those who have signed on, because life in Eden isn’t going to be bliss. They pit the participants against each other with brutal, grueling tasks to be done. Nyxia’s power is that it can be turned into anything. Emmett turns it into a facemask that can translate languages, thereby allowing him to communicate with the others. It’s through these interactions that Emmett discovers that the only thing common among all the participants is that they’re broken. Each is escaping a trauma too much to bear. The leader of his team is a girl named Morning. Emmett and Morning begin a friendship that demands that one of them be sacrifice. Who will it be?

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Phaet (pronounced ‘fate’) Theta’s ancestors have moved to the Moon to escape the ill effects of climate change and the inhospitable living conditions on Earth. Life in the lunar colony is confined, regulated and controlled by an anonymous Committee and the Military. Phaet lives with her mother and siblings. Since her father’s death nine years ago, Phaet has withdrawn into a silence that she rarely breaks. She reacts to almost nothing, leaving people to wonder whether she feels anything at all. She’s most at home in the greenhouse where she works. She wants to become a bioengineer. Life goes on until her mother, a fearless journalist, is forcibly quarantined for ‘medical’ reasons. Suddenly, Phaet, whose name means ‘dove’, faces the tough task of protecting her siblings from the filthy environs of the Shelter. Intelligent and motivated, she begins working out with Cadet Wes Kappa. She forces herself out of her thoughts and starts to engage with the world outside. Will she be able to rescue her mother and overthrow the current regime?

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Seventeen-year-old Spensa lives alongside other humans on planet called Detritus, which is in ruins thanks to constant attacks by aliens known as the Krell. Spensa dreams of becoming a pilot, a much-revered group of people dedicated to protecting Detritus. However, she’s haunted by her father’s reputation: He was a pilot who was branded a traitor and killed by his own team when he sought to abandon an intense battle with the Krell, Spensa, seen as nothing more than a coward’s daughter, is determined to not allow anything to stand between her and the flight academy. She gets a near-perfect score during the entrance examination – despite it being rigged against her – prompting her father’s former wingmate to agree to train her. During the course of her training, Spensa bonds with her classmates, practises and perfects fighting techniques, repairs a crashed spaceship that has a computer with artificial intelligence, goes to battle, loses some of her friends, tries to abandon battle, is branded a coward and grounded. Instead of wallowing in her defeat and misery, Spensa climbs back into her spaceship and travels into space and intercepts some sensitive communication of the Krell.

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