SECTION A

The IB English Department recommends these books as preparation for Language and
Literature

Compulsory Reading

Woman at Point Zero

by Nawal El Saadawi, Sherif Hetata
(Translator)

From her prison cell, Firdaus, sentenced to

die for having killed a pimp in a Cairo street,
tells of her life from village childhood to city
prostitute. Society's retribution for her act of
defiance - death - she welcomes as the only
way she can finally be free.

Medea
by Euripides, Rex Warner (Translator)

One of the most powerful and enduring of

Greek tragedies, Medea centers on the myth
of Jason, leader of the Argonauts, who has
won the dragon-guarded treasure of the
Golden Fleece with the help of the sorceress
Medea. Having married Medea and fathered
her two children, Jason abandons her for a
more favorable match, never suspecting the
terrible revenge she will take.

Euripides' masterly portrayal of the motives

fiercely driving Medea's pursuit of vengeance
for her husband's insult and betrayal has held
theater audiences spellbound for more than
twenty centuries.
The World's Wife
by Carol Ann Duffy

Stunningly original and haunting, the voices

of Mrs. Midas, Queen Kong, and Frau Freud,
to say nothing of the Devil's Wife herself,
startle us with their wit, imagination, and
incisiveness in this collection of poems written
from the perspectives of the wives, sisters, or
girlfriends of famous—and infamous—male
personages. Carol Ann Duffy is a master at
drawing on myth and history, then subverting
them in a vivid and surprising way to create
poems that have the pull of the past and the
crack of the contemporary.

The Handmaid's Tale

(The Handmaid's Tale #1)
by Margaret Atwood

Offred is a Handmaid in the Republic of

Gilead. She may leave the home of the
Commander and his wife once a day to walk
to food markets whose signs are now pictures
instead of words because women are no
longer allowed to read. She must lie on her
back once a month and pray that the
Commander makes her pregnant, because in
an age of declining births, Offred and the
other Handmaids are valued only if their
ovaries are viable. Offred can remember the
years before, when she lived and made love
with her husband, Luke; when she played
with and protected her daughter; when she
had a job, money of her own, and access to
knowledge. But all of that is gone now . . .

Funny, unexpected, horrifying, and altogether

convincing, The Handmaid's Tale is at once
scathing satire, dire warning, and tour de
force.
Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood
(Persepolis Book 2)
by Marjane Satrapi, Mattias Ripa
(Translator)

In powerful black-and-white comic strip

images, Satrapi tells the story of her life in
Tehran from ages six to fourteen, years that
saw the overthrow of the Shah’s regime, the
triumph of the Islamic Revolution, and the
devastating effects of war with Iraq. The
intelligent and outspoken only child of
committed Marxists and the great-
granddaughter of one of Iran’s last emperors,
Marjane bears witness to a childhood
uniquely entwined with the history of her
country.

Persepolis paints an unforgettable portrait of

daily life in Iran and of the bewildering
contradictions between home life and public
life. Marjane’s child’s-eye view of dethroned
emperors, state-sanctioned whippings, and
heroes of the revolution allows us to learn as
she does the history of this fascinating
country and of her own extraordinary family.
Intensely personal, profoundly political, and
wholly original, Persepolis is at once a story
of growing up and a reminder of the human
cost of war and political repression. It shows
how we carry on, with laughter and tears, in
the face of absurdity. And, finally, it
introduces us to an irresistible little girl with
whom we cannot help but fall in love.
Other Recommendations

Graphic Memoir-

Shoplifter
by Michael Cho

Corrina Park used to have big plans.

Studying English literature in college, she

imagined writing a successful novel and
leading the idealized life of an author. But
she’s been working at the same advertising
agency for the past five years and the only
thing she’s written is . . . copy. Corrina knows
there must be more to life, but she faces the
same question as does everyone in her
generation: how to find it?

Here is the brilliant debut graphic novel about

a young woman’s search for happiness and
self-fulfillment in the big city.

Paying the Land

by Joe Sacco

The Dene have lived in the vast Mackenzie

River Valley since time immemorial, by their
account. To the Dene, the land owns them
and it is central to their livelihood and very
way of being. But the subarctic Canadian
Northwest Territories are home to valuable
resources, including oil, gas, and diamonds.
With mining came jobs and investment, but
also road-building, pipelines, and toxic waste,
which scarred the landscape, and alcohol,
drugs, and debt, which deformed a way of
life.

In Paying the Land, Joe Sacco travels the

frozen North to reveal a people in conflict
over the costs and benefits of development.
Sacco recounts the shattering impact of a
residential school system that aimed to
“remove the Indian from the child”; the
destructive process that drove the Dene from
the bush into settlements and turned them
into wage laborers; the government land
claims stacked against the Dene Nation; and
their uphill efforts to revive a wounded
culture.

American Born Chinese

by Gene Luen Yang

All Jin Wang wants is to fit in. When his family

moves to a new neighborhood, he suddenly
finds that he's the only Chinese American
student at his school. Jocks and bullies pick
on him constantly, and he has hardly any
friends. Then, to make matters worse, he falls
in love with an all-American girl...

Born to rule over all the monkeys in the world,

the story of the Monkey King is one of the
oldest and greatest Chinese fables. Adored
by his subjects, master of the arts of kung-fu,
he is the most powerful monkey on earth. But
the Monkey King doesn't want to be a
monkey. He wants to be hailed as a god...

Chin-Kee is the ultimate negative Chinese

stereotype, and he's ruining his cousin
Danny's life. Danny's a popular kid at school,
but every year Chin-Kee comes to visit, and
every year Danny has to transfer to a new
school to escape the shame. This year,
though, things quickly go from bad to worse...

These three apparently unrelated tales come

together with an unexpected twist, in a
modern fable that is hilarious, poignant and
action-packed. American Born Chinese is an
amazing rise, all the way up to the
astonishing climax--and confirms what a
growing number of readers already know:
Gene Yang is a major talent.
Non-Fiction -

Down and Out in Paris and London

by George Orwell

This unusual fictional memoir - in good part

autobiographical - narrates without self-pity
and often with humor the adventures of a
penniless British writer among the down-and-
outs of two great cities. The Parisian episode
is fascinating for its expose of the kitchens of
posh French restaurants, where the narrator
works at the bottom of the culinary echelon as
dishwasher, or plongeur. In London, while
waiting for a job, he experiences the world of
tramps, street people, and free lodging
houses. In the tales of both cities we learn
some sobering Orwellian truths about poverty
and of society.

Me Talk Pretty One Day

by David Sedaris

David Sedaris' move to Paris from New York

inspired these hilarious pieces, including the
title essay, about his attempts to learn French
from a sadistic teacher who declares that
every day spent with you is like having a
caesarean section. His family is another
inspiration. You Can't Kill the Rooster is a
portrait of his brother, who talks incessant
hip-hop slang to his bewildered father. And no
one hones a finer fury in response to such
modern annoyances as restaurant meals
presented in ludicrous towers of food and
cashiers with six-inch fingernails.
A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which
Four Russians Give a Master Class on
Writing, Reading, and Life
By George Saunders

For the last twenty years, George Saunders

has been teaching a class on the Russian
short story to his MFA students at Syracuse
University. In A Swim in a Pond in the Rain,
he shares a version of that class with us,
offering some of what he and his students
have discovered together over the years.
Paired with iconic short stories by Chekhov,
Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol, the seven
essays in this book are intended for anyone
interested in how fiction works and why it’s
more relevant than ever in these turbulent
times.

In his introduction, Saunders writes, “We’re

going to enter seven fastidiously constructed
scale models of the world, made for a specific
purpose that our time maybe doesn’t fully
endorse but that these writers accepted
implicitly as the aim of art—namely, to ask the
big questions, questions like, How are we
supposed to be living down here? What were
we put here to accomplish? What should we
value? What is truth, anyway, and how might
we recognize it?” He approaches the stories
technically yet accessibly, and through them
explains how narrative functions; why we stay
immersed in a story and why we resist it; and
the bedrock virtues a writer must foster. The
process of writing, Saunders reminds us, is a
technical craft, but also a way of training
oneself to see the world with new openness
and curiosity.

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is a deep

exploration not just of how great writing works
but of how the mind itself works while
reading, and of how the reading and writing of
stories make genuine connection possible.
A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise
of Black Performance
by Hanif Abdurraqib

At the March on Washington in 1963,

Josephine Baker was fifty-seven years old,
well beyond her most prolific days. But in her
speech she was in a mood to consider her
life, her legacy, her departure from the
country she was now triumphantly returning
to. “I was a devil in other countries, and I was
a little devil in America, too,” she told the
crowd. Inspired by these few words, Hanif
Abdurraqib has written a profound and lasting
reflection on how Black performance is
inextricably woven into the fabric of American
culture. Each moment in every performance
he examines—whether it’s the twenty-seven
seconds in “Gimme Shelter” in which Merry
Clayton wails the words “rape, murder,” a
schoolyard fistfight, a dance marathon, or the
instant in a game of spades right after the
cards are dealt—has layers of resonance in
Black and white cultures, the politics of
American empire, and Abdurraqib’s own
personal history of love, grief, and
performance.

Abdurraqib writes prose brimming with

jubilation and pain, infused with the lyricism
and rhythm of the musicians he loves. With
care and generosity, he explains the
poignancy of performances big and small,
each one feeling intensely familiar and vital,
both timeless and desperately urgent. Filled
with sharp insight, humor, and heart, A Little
Devil in America exalts the Black
performance that unfolds in specific moments
in time and space—from midcentury Paris to
the moon, and back down again to a cramped
living room in Columbus, Ohio.
 SECTION B

The IB English Department recommends these books as preparation for Literature

Compulsory Reading

My Seditious Heart: Collected Nonfiction

by Arundhati Roy

Bookended by her two award-winning novels,

The God of Small Things (1997) and The
Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017), My
Seditious Heart collects the work of a two-
decade period when Arundhati Roy devoted
herself to the political essay as a way of
opening up space for justice, rights, and
freedoms in an increasingly hostile world.
Taken together, the essays speak in a voice
of unique spirit, marked by compassion,
clarity, and courage. Radical and superbly
readable, they speak always in defense of the
collective, of the individual and of the land, in
the face of the destructive logic of financial,
social, religious, military, and governmental
elites.

Miss Julie
By August Strindberg

Miss Julie is a full-length drama in one act by

August Strindberg, published in Swedish as
Fröken Julie in 1888 and performed in 1889.
It was also translated into English as
Countess Julie (1912) and Lady Julie (1950).
The play substitutes such interludes as a
peasant dance and a pantomime for the
conventional divisions of acts, scenes, and
intermissions.

Julie, an aristocratic young woman, has a

brief affair with Jean, her father’s valet. After
the sexual thrill has dissipated, they realize
that they have little or nothing in common.
Heredity, combined with social and
psychological factors, has determined their
futures. Strindberg portrays Julie as an
aristocrat whose era has passed and Jean as
an opportunistic social climber to whom the
future beckons.

A Streetcar Named Desire

by Tennessee Williams

The Pulitzer Prize and Drama Critics Circle

Award winning play—reissued with an
introduction by Arthur Miller (Death of a
Salesman and The Crucible), and Williams’
essay “The World I Live In.”

It is a very short list of 20th-century American

plays that continue to have the same power
and impact as when they first appeared—57
years after its Broadway premiere,
Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named
Desire is one of those plays. The story
famously recounts how the faded and
promiscuous Blanche DuBois is pushed over
the edge by her sexy and brutal brother-in-
law, Stanley Kowalski. Streetcar launched the
careers of Marlon Brando, Jessica Tandy,
Kim Hunter, and Karl Malden, and solidified
the position of Tennessee Williams as one of
the most important young playwrights of his
generation, as well as that of Elia Kazan as
the greatest American stage director of the
’40s and ’50s.

Death of a Salesman
by Arthur Miller

'For a salesman, there is no rock bottom to

life. He don't put a bolt to a nut, he don't tell
you the law or give you medicine. He's a man
way out there in the blue, riding on a smile
and a shoeshine.'

Willy Loman has been a salesman for 34

years. At 60, he is cast aside, his usefulness
now exhausted. With no future to dream
about he must face the crushing
disappointments of his past. He takes one
final brave action, but is he heroic at last?, or
a self-deluding fool?
A Doll's House
by Henrik Ibsen, T. Weber (Translator),
Michael Meyer (Translator)

A Doll's House (1879), is a masterpiece of

theatrical craft which, for the first time
portrayed the tragic hypocrisy of Victorian
middle class marriage on the stage. The play
ushered in a new social era and "exploded
like a bomb into contemporary life".

The Age of Innocence

by Edith Wharton

Winner of the 1921 Pulitzer Prize, The Age of

Innocence is Edith Wharton’s masterful
portrait of desire and betrayal during the
sumptuous Golden Age of Old New York, a
time when society people “dreaded scandal
more than disease.”

This is Newland Archer’s world as he

prepares to marry the beautiful but
conventional May Welland. But when the
mysterious Countess Ellen Olenska returns to
New York after a disastrous marriage, Archer
falls deeply in love with her. Torn between
duty and passion, Archer struggles to make a
decision that will either courageously define
his life—or mercilessly destroy it.
The Sympathizer
(The Sympathizer #1)
by Viet Thanh Nguyen

It is April 1975, and Saigon is in chaos. At his

villa, a general of the South Vietnamese army
is drinking whiskey and, with the help of his
trusted captain, drawing up a list of those who
will be given passage aboard the last flights
out of the country. The general and his
compatriots start a new life in Los Angeles,
unaware that one among their number, the
captain, is secretly observing and reporting
on the group to a higher-up in the Viet Cong.
The Sympathizer is the story of this captain: a
man brought up by an absent French father
and a poor Vietnamese mother, a man who
went to university in America, but returned to
Vietnam to fight for the Communist cause. A
gripping spy novel, an astute exploration of
extreme politics, and a moving love story, The
Sympathizer explores a life between two
worlds and examines the legacy of the
Vietnam War in literature, film, and the wars
we fight today.

Exit West
by Mohsin Hamid

In a country teetering on the brink of civil war,

two young people meet—sensual, fiercely
independent Nadia and gentle, restrained
Saeed. They embark on a furtive love affair
and are soon cloistered in a premature
intimacy by the unrest roiling their city. When
it explodes, turning familiar streets into a
patchwork of checkpoints and bomb blasts,
they begin to hear whispers about doors—
doors that can whisk people far away, if
perilously and for a price. As the violence
escalates, Nadia and Saeed decide that they
no longer have a choice. Leaving their
homeland and their old lives behind, they find
a door and step through.

Exit West follows these characters as they

emerge into an alien and uncertain future,
struggling to hold on to each other, to their
past, to the very sense of who they are.
Profoundly intimate and powerfully inventive,
it tells an unforgettable story of love, loyalty,
and courage that is both completely of our
time and for all time.

Night Sky with Exit Wounds

by Ocean Vuong

Ocean Vuong's first full-length collection aims

straight for the perennial "big"—and very
human—subjects of romance, family,
memory, grief, war, and melancholia. None of
these he allows to overwhelm his spirit or his
poems, which demonstrate, through breath
and cadence and unrepentant enthrallment,
that a gentle palm on a chest can calm the
fiercest hungers.

The World's Wife

by Carol Ann Duffy

Stunningly original and haunting, the voices

of Mrs. Midas, Queen Kong, and Frau Freud,
to say nothing of the Devil's Wife herself,
startle us with their wit, imagination, and
incisiveness in this collection of poems written
from the perspectives of the wives, sisters, or
girlfriends of famous—and infamous—male
personages. Carol Ann Duffy is a master at
drawing on myth and history, then subverting
them in a vivid and surprising way to create
poems that have the pull of the past and the
crack of the contemporary.
Other Recommendations

Home Fire
by Kamila Shamsie

Isma is free. After years of watching out for

her younger siblings in the wake of their
mother’s death, she’s accepted an invitation
from a mentor in America that allows her to
resume a dream long deferred. But she can’t
stop worrying about Aneeka, her beautiful,
headstrong sister back in London, or their
brother, Parvaiz, who’s disappeared in pursuit
of his own dream, to prove himself to the dark
legacy of the jihadist father he never knew.
When he resurfaces half a globe away,
Isma’s worst fears are confirmed.

Then Eamonn enters the sisters’ lives. Son of

a powerful political figure, he has his own
birthright to live up to—or defy. Is he to be a
chance at love? The means of Parvaiz’s
salvation? Suddenly, two families’ fates are
inextricably, devastatingly entwined, in this
searing novel that asks: What sacrifices will
we make in the name of love?

The suspenseful and heartbreaking story of

an immigrant family driven to pit love against
loyalty, with devastating consequences

Human Acts
by Han Kang, Deborah Smith (Translator),
Gan Kh.

From the internationally bestselling author of

The Vegetarian, a rare and astonishing (The
Observer) portrait of political unrest and the
universal struggle for justice.

In the midst of a violent student uprising in

South Korea, a young boy named Dong-ho is
shockingly killed.

The story of this tragic episode unfolds in a

sequence of interconnected chapters as the
victims and the bereaved encounter
suppression, denial, and the echoing agony
of the massacre. From Dong-ho's best friend
who meets his own fateful end; to an editor
struggling against censorship; to a prisoner
and a factory worker, each suffering from
traumatic memories; and to Dong-ho's own
grief-stricken mother; and through their
collective heartbreak and acts of hope is the
tale of a brutalized people in search of a
voice.

An award-winning, controversial bestseller,

Human Acts is a timeless, pointillist portrait of
an historic event with reverberations still
being felt today, by turns tracing the harsh
reality of oppression and the resounding,
extraordinary poetry of humanity.

Girl, Woman, Other

by Bernardine Evaristo, Julia Osuna
Aguilar (translator)

Joint Winner of the Man Booker Prize 2019

Teeming with life and crackling with energy —

a love song to modern Britain and black
womanhood

Girl, Woman, Other follows the lives and

struggles of twelve very different characters.
Mostly women, black and British, they tell the
stories of their families, friends and lovers,
across the country and through the years.

Joyfully polyphonic and vibrantly

contemporary, this is a gloriously new kind of
history, a novel of our times: celebratory,
ever-dynamic and utterly irresistible.
Nutshell
by Ian McEwan

Nutshell is a classic story of murder and

deceit, told by a narrator with a perspective
and voice unlike any in recent literature. A
bravura performance, it is the finest recent
work from a true master.

To be bound in a nutshell, see the world in

two inches of ivory, in a grain of sand. Why
not, when all of literature, all of art, of human
endeavour, is just a speck in the universe of
possible things.

Lincoln in the Bardo

by George Saunders

In his long-awaited first novel, American

master George Saunders delivers his most
original, transcendent, and moving work yet.
Unfolding in a graveyard over the course of a
single night, narrated by a dazzling chorus of
voices, Lincoln in the Bardo is a literary
experience unlike any other—for no one but
Saunders could conceive it.

February 1862. The Civil War is less than one

year old. The fighting has begun in earnest,
and the nation has begun to realize it is in for
a long, bloody struggle. Meanwhile, President
Lincoln’s beloved eleven-year-old son, Willie,
lies upstairs in the White House, gravely ill. In
a matter of days, despite predictions of a
recovery, Willie dies and is laid to rest in a
Georgetown cemetery. “My poor boy, he was
too good for this earth,” the president says at
the time. “God has called him home.”
Newspapers report that a grief-stricken
Lincoln returned to the crypt several times
alone to hold his boy’s body.

From that seed of historical truth, George

Saunders spins an unforgettable story of
familial love and loss that breaks free of its
realistic, historical framework into a thrilling,
supernatural realm both hilarious and
terrifying. Willie Lincoln finds himself in a
strange purgatory, where ghosts mingle,
gripe, commiserate, quarrel, and enact
bizarre acts of penance. Within this
transitional state—called, in the Tibetan
tradition, the bardo—a monumental struggle
erupts over young Willie’s soul.

Lincoln in the Bardo is an astonishing feat of

imagination and a bold step forward from one
of the most important and influential writers of
his generation. Formally daring, generous in
spirit, deeply concerned with matters of the
heart, it is a testament to fiction’s ability to
speak honestly and powerfully to the things
that really matter to us. Saunders has
invented a thrilling new form that deploys a
kaleidoscopic, theatrical panorama of
voices—living and dead, historical and
invented—to ask a timeless, profound
question: How do we live and love when we
know that everything we love must end? (

Fight Club
(Fight Club #1)
by Chuck Palahniuk

Chuck Palahniuk showed himself to be his

generation’s most visionary satirist in this, his
first book. Fight Club’s estranged narrator
leaves his lackluster job when he comes
under the thrall of Tyler Durden, an enigmatic
young man who holds secret after-hours
boxing matches in the basement of bars.
There, two men fight "as long as they have
to." This is a gloriously original work that
exposes the darkness at the core of our
modern world.
The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois
by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

The 2020 National Book Award–nominated

poet makes her fiction debut with this
magisterial epic—an intimate yet sweeping
novel with all the luminescence and force of
Homegoing; Sing, Unburied, Sing; and The
Water Dancer—that chronicles the journey of
one American family, from the centuries of
the colonial slave trade through the Civil War
to our own tumultuous era.

The great scholar, W. E. B. Du Bois, once

wrote about the Problem of race in America,
and what he called “Double Consciousness,”
a sensitivity that every African American
possesses in order to survive. Since
childhood, Ailey Pearl Garfield has
understood Du Bois’s words all too well.
Bearing the names of two formidable Black
Americans—the revered choreographer Alvin
Ailey and her great grandmother Pearl, the
descendant of enslaved Georgians and
tenant farmers—Ailey carries Du Bois’s
Problem on her shoulders.

Ailey is reared in the north in the City but

spends summers in the small Georgia town of
Chicasetta, where her mother’s family has
lived since their ancestors arrived from Africa
in bondage. From an early age, Ailey fights a
battle for belonging that’s made all the more
difficult by a hovering trauma, as well as the
whispers of women—her mother, Belle, her
sister, Lydia, and a maternal line reaching
back two centuries—that urge Ailey to
succeed in their stead.

To come to terms with her own identity, Ailey

embarks on a journey through her family’s
past, uncovering the shocking tales of
generations of ancestors—Indigenous, Black,
and white—in the deep South. In doing so
Ailey must learn to embrace her full heritage,
a legacy of oppression and resistance,
bondage and independence, cruelty and
resilience that is the story—and the song—of
America itself.
Great Circle
by Maggie Shipstead

Spanning Prohibition-era Montana, the Pacific

Northwest, Alaska, New Zealand, wartime
London, and modern-day Los Angeles, Great
Circle tells the unforgettable story of a
daredevil female aviator determined to chart
her own course in life, at any cost.

After being rescued as infants from a sinking

ocean liner in 1914, Marian and Jamie
Graves are raised by their dissolute uncle in
Missoula, Montana. There—after
encountering a pair of barnstorming pilots
passing through town in beat-up biplanes—
Marian commences her lifelong love affair
with flight. At fourteen she drops out of school
and finds an unexpected and dangerous
patron in a wealthy bootlegger who provides
a plane and subsidizes her lessons, an
arrangement that will haunt her for the rest of
her life, even as it allows her to fulfill her
destiny: circumnavigating the globe by flying
over the North and South Poles.

A century later, Hadley Baxter is cast to play

Marian in a film that centers on Marian's
disappearance in Antarctica. Vibrant, canny,
disgusted with the claustrophobia of
Hollywood, Hadley is eager to redefine
herself after a romantic film franchise has
imprisoned her in the grip of cult celebrity.
Her immersion into the character of Marian
unfolds, thrillingly, alongside Marian's own
story, as the two women's fates—and their
hunger for self-determination in vastly
different geographies and times—collide. Epic
and emotional, meticulously researched and
gloriously told, Great Circle is a monumental
work of art, and a tremendous leap forward
for the prodigiously gifted Maggie Shipstead.
The Promise
by Damon Galgut

The Promise charts the crash and burn of a

white South African family, living on a farm
outside Pretoria. The Swarts are gathering for
Ma's funeral. The younger generation, Anton
and Amor, detest everything the family stand
for -- not least the failed promise to the Black
woman who has worked for them her whole
life. After years of service, Salome was
promised her own house, her own land... yet
somehow, as each decade passes, that
promise remains unfulfilled.

The narrator's eye shifts and blinks: moving

fluidly between characters, flying into their
dreams; deliciously lethal in its observation.
And as the country moves from old deep
divisions to its new so-called fairer society,
the lost promise of more than just one family
hovers behind the novel's title.

In this story of a diminished family, sharp and

tender emotional truths hit home. Confident,
deft and quietly powerful, The Promise is
literary fiction at its finest.