The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (by John Boyne)

AS BUT BY DESPITE EITHER ENTIRELY FOR

HAVING KEEPS KEPT LAST LATEST MIGHT MUST
ORDER OUT REFERS SO SPOIL TAKES THAT
WHEN WHILE WITHOUT WHO

[0]_____a rule, it's the job of a dust jacket to tell you what's inside a book. But not in this
case.
"We think it would [1]_____ the reading of the book," declared the publishers on the back
cover of the original edition, published in 2006. "It's important that you start to read
[2]_____ knowing what it's about." Since then, however, this hugely successful book has
been made into a film, and, far from drawing a veil over the subject matter, the front cover
of the [3]_____ edition carries a photograph that makes it all too clear what the story's
about. But, in [4]_____ to read the book as author John Boyne originally intended, you
should really start at page one with no preconceptions.
The tale begins with a nine-year-old boy called Bruno [5]_____ to leave his home in
wartime Berlin and travel with his family to a remote part of the countryside. Here, large
crowds of men, women and children are [6]_____ behind a large fence, all of them wearing
the same washed-out blue-and-grey striped uniforms. [7]_____contrast, Bruno lives on the
other side of the fence with his mother, his sister and his authoritarian father, [8]_____ is a
Nazi commandant.
Where this telling of the concentration camp story differs from others is that, [9]_____ we
know all too well what's happening, our young hero Bruno doesn't. Bit by bit, he pieces
together his observations, forming a picture that never becomes [10]_____ clear until the
shocking ending of the book.
Unable to grasp the name of the place he's come to, Bruno [11]_____ to it as Out-with,
instead of Auschwitz. As for the angry, moustachioed little man in uniform who [12]_____
coming and haranguing his father, he thinks he's called The Fury, instead of Führer. And he
never quite gets to the bottom of why his father's soldiers are [13]_____ nasty, and the
people in the striped pyjamas so scared.
All this [14]_____ the fact that Bruno meets a young inmate called Shmuel, who is the
same age as him. They strike up a friendship that is conducted entirely through a barbed-
wire fence, conveniently [15]_____ of sight of the guards.
The book has been criticised in some quarters for the length of time it [16]_____ Bruno to
find out what's happening, but Boyne, a graduate of the University of East Anglia's
celebrated creative writing course, says the hole-pickers are missing the point.
"The fact is that this book is a fable and you can approach a fable [17]_____ with your
head or your heart," says Boyne, who lives in Dublin. "Yes, Bruno is slow to realise what's
going on and there are a thousand reasons why events [18]_____ not have unfolded
exactly as they do, but in my view, the reader does better just to sit back and accept the
story, rather than fighting it."
There is no denying that this book captures perfectly not just the thinking of a young boy
who is not being told the full story, [19]_____ also his way of speaking. The text is full of
phrases that Bruno has borrowed from the adult world, such as "for the foreseeable future",
"chalk it up to experience" and, in the case of his self-willed sister Gretel, "a hopeless
case".
He can't quite grasp why his father and grandmother have fallen out (she's against the
Nazis), or why his father [20]_____never know that their cook Pavel has bandaged a cut on
Bruno's leg (Pavel is Jewish and Bruno's father is, of necessity, violently anti-Semitic).

It also comes as a complete surprise to our young hero to discover that there are no bars
and cafés in the concentration camp for people to sit out at, like he remembers from Berlin.
 KEY 0. as 1. SPOIL 2. WITHOUT
3. LATEST 4. ORDER 5. HAVING 6. KEPT 7. BY 8. WHO
9. WHILE 10. ENTIRELY 11. REFERS 12. KEEPS 13. SO 14. DESPITE
15. OUT 16. TAKES 17. EITHER 18. MIGHT 19. BUT 20. MUST