Every time a book gets banned, a censored copy appears here in the vault!
Until we know the titles, we can't put them away on the shelves.
A new batch just came in and you look like you'd enjoy getting your hands
on a few forbidden volumes. Read the blurbs and help me figure out the
titles, then I can tell you a little more...
Through the young eyes of Scout and Jem Finch, Harper Lee explores with exuberant humour the irrationality of adult attitudes to race and class in the Deep South of the 1930s. The conscience of a town steeped in prejudice, violence and hypocrisy is pricked by the stamina of one man's struggle for justice. But the weight of history will only tolerate so much.
It's Christmas and Holden Caulfield has just been expelled from yet
another school. Fleeing the crooks at Pencey Prep, he pinballs around
New York City seeking solace in fleeting encounters - shooting the
bull with strangers in dive hotels, wandering alone round Central
Park, getting beaten up by pimps and cut down by erstwhile
girlfriends.
This book is an all-time classic coming-of-age story: an elegy to
teenage alienation, capturing the deeply human need for connection and
the bewildering sense of loss as we leave childhood behind.
Sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen regards it as a death sentence when she is forced to represent her district in a fight to the death on live TV. But Katniss has been close to death before-and survival, for her, is second nature. This is a searing novel set in a future with unsettling parallels to our present. Welcome to the deadliest reality TV show ever...
Drawing on James Baldwin's own boyhood in a religious community in 1930s Harlem, his first novel tells the story of young Johnny Grimes. Johnny is destined to become a preacher like his father, Gabriel, at the Temple of the Fire Baptized, where the church swells with song and it is as if 'the Holy Ghost were riding on the air'. But he feels only scalding hatred for Gabriel, whose fear and fanaticism lead him to abuse his family. Johnny vows that, for him, things will be different. This blazing tale is full of passion and guilt, of secret sinners and prayers singing on the wind.
Offred lives in The Republic of Gilead. To some, it is a utopian vision of the future, a place of safety, a place where everyone has a purpose, a function. But The Republic of Gilead offers Offred only one function: to breed. If she deviates, she will, like dissenters, be hanged at the wall or sent out to die slowly of radiation sickness. But even a repressive state cannot obliterate desire - neither Offred's nor that of the two men on which her future hangs.
A storytelling competition within a group of pilgrims from all walks of life is the occasion for a series of tales that range from the Knight's account of courtly love and the ebullient Wife of Bath's Arthurian legend to the ribald anecdotes of the Miller and the Cook. This masterly and vivid modern English verse translation retains all the vigour and poetry of Chaucer's fourteenth-centurey Middle English.
Sixteen-year-old Starr lives in two worlds: the poor neighbourhood where she was born and raised and her posh high school in the suburbs. The uneasy balance between them is shattered when Starr is the only witness to the fatal shooting of her unarmed best friend, Khalil, by a police officer. Now what Starr says could destroy her community. It could also get her killed.
Coded by Celia Morris