Novels that break you on a long flight
Thirty thousand feet up, nowhere to hide, and a book that decides this is the moment to take you apart. Stories with enough emotional weight to undo a stranger in seat 24B.
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The 7 books on this stack
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The Kite Runner
Khaled Hosseini · 2004
THE NUMBER ONE BESTSELLER 'Devastating' Daily Telegraph 'Heartbreaking' The Times 'Unforgettable' Isabel Allende 'Haunting' Independent Afghanistan, 1975: Twelve-year-old Amir is desperate to win the local kite-fighting tournament and his loyal friend Hassan promises to help him. But neither of the boys can foresee what will happen to Hassan that afternoon, an event that is to shatter their lives. After the Russians invade and the family is forced to flee to America, Amir realises that one day he must return to Afghanistan under Taliban rule to find the one thing that his new world cannot grant him: redemption.
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The Book Thief
Markus Zusak · 1998
The extraordinary international bestseller from the author of new novel Bridge of Clay. NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE "Brilliant and hugely ambitious ... the kind of book that can be life changing" The New York Times It is 1939. Nazi Germany. The country is holding its breath. Death has never been busier, and will become busier still. By her brother's graveside, Liesel's life is changed when she picks up a single object, partially hidden in the snow. It is The Gravedigger's Handbook, left there by accident, and it is her first act of book thievery. So begins a love affair with books and words, as Liesel, with the help of her accordion-playing foster father, learns to read. Soon she is stealing books from Nazi book-burnings, the mayor's wife's library, wherever there are books to be found. But these are dangerous times. When Liesel's foster family hides a Jewish fist-fighter in their basement, Liesel's world is both opened up, and closed down. The Book Thief is a story about the power of words to make worlds. In superbly crafted writing that burns with intensity, award-winning author Markus Zusak has given us one of the most enduring stories of our time. ACCLAIM FOR THE BOOK THIEF "The Book Thief deserves a place on the same shelf with The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank and Elie Wiesel's Night. It seems poised to become a classic." USA Today "Elegant, philosophical and moving ... Beautiful and important." Kirkus Reviews "Extraordinary, resonant and relevant, beautiful and angry." Sunday Telegraph "...a beautifully balanced piece of storytelling...Unsettling, thought-provoking, life affirming, triumphant and tragic, this is a novel of breathtaking scope, masterfully told. It is an important piece of work, but also a wonderful page-turner." The Guardian "A moving work which will make many eyes brim." Independent on Sunday AWARDS FOR THE BOOK THIEF Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best Book (South East Asia & South Pacific) 2006 School Library Journal Best Book of the Year 2006 Daniel Elliott Peace Award 2006 Publishers Weekly Best Children's Book of the Year 2006 National Jewish Book Award for Children's and Young Adult Literature 2006 Bulletin Blue Ribbon Book 2006 Michael L. Printz Honor Book 2007 Book Sense Book of the Year Award for Children's Literature 2007 Winner of the ALA Youth Medal Awards' Margaret A. Edwards Award 2014
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When Breath Becomes Air
Paul Kalanithi · 2016
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • This inspiring, exquisitely observed memoir finds hope and beauty in the face of insurmountable odds as an idealistic young neurosurgeon attempts to answer the question, What makes a life worth living? “Unmissable . . . Finishing this book and then forgetting about it is simply not an option.”—Janet Maslin, The New York Times ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, People, NPR, The Washington Post, Slate, Harper’s Bazaar, Time Out New York, Publishers Weekly, BookPage At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade’s worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live. And just like that, the future he and his wife had imagined evaporated. When Breath Becomes Air chronicles Kalanithi’s transformation from a naïve medical student “possessed,” as he wrote, “by the question of what, given that all organisms die, makes a virtuous and meaningful life” into a neurosurgeon at Stanford working in the brain, the most critical place for human identity, and finally into a patient and new father confronting his own mortality. What makes life worth living in the face of death? What do you do when the future, no longer a ladder toward your goals in life, flattens out into a perpetual present? What does it mean to have a child, to nurture a new life as another fades away? These are some of the questions Kalanithi wrestles with in this profoundly moving, exquisitely observed memoir. Paul Kalanithi died in March 2015, while working on this book, yet his words live on as a guide and a gift to us all. “I began to realize that coming face to face with my own mortality, in a sense, had changed nothing and everything,” he wrote. “Seven words from Samuel Beckett began to repeat in my head: ‘I can’t go on. I’ll go on.’” When Breath Becomes Air is an unforgettable, life-affirming reflection on the challenge of facing death and on the relationship between doctor and patient, from a brilliant writer who became both. Finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award in Creative Nonfiction and the Books for a Better Life Award in Inspirational Memoir
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Little Life (NHB Modern Plays) : (stage Version)
Hanya Yanagihara · 2008
A Little Life is a 2015 novel by American novelist Hanya Yanagihara. The novel was written over the course of eighteen months. Despite the length and difficult subject matter, it became a bestseller.
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Never Let Me Go
Kazuo Ishiguro · 2005
**OVER 1 MILLION COPIES SOLD** SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE A SUNDAY TIMES 'TOP 5 NOVEL OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY' 'Brilliantly executed.' MARGARET ATWOOD 'A page-turner and a heartbreaker.' TIME 'Masterly.' SUNDAY TIMES One of the most acclaimed novels of the 21st Century, from the Nobel Prize-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro imagines the lives of a group of students growing up in a darkly skewed version of contemporary England. Narrated by Kathy, now thirty-one, Never Let Me Go dramatises her attempts to come to terms with her childhood at the seemingly idyllic Hailsham School and with the fate that has always awaited her and her closest friends in the wider world. A story of love, friendship and memory, Never Let Me Go is charged throughout with a sense of the fragility of life. 'Exquisite.' GUARDIAN 'A feat of imaginative sympathy.' NEW YORK TIMES What readers are saying: 'A book I will return to again and again, and one that keeps me thinking even after finishing it.' 'I loved it, every single word of it.' 'It took me wholly by surprise.' 'Utterly beautiful.' 'Essentially perfect.'
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Atonement
Ian McEwan · 2001
A story that begins with three young people in the garden of a country house on the hottest day of 1935, and ends with three profoundly changed lives. A depiction of love and war, class, childhood and England, that explores shame and forgiveness, atonement and the possibility of absolution.
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A Fine Balance
Rohinton Mistry · 1995
With a compassionate realism and narrative sweep that recall the work of Charles Dickens, this magnificent novel captures all the cruelty and corruption, dignity and heroism, of India. The time is 1975. The place is an unnamed city by the sea. The government has just declared a State of Emergency, in whose upheavals four strangers--a spirited widow, a young student uprooted from his idyllic hill station, and two tailors who have fled the caste violence of their native village--will be thrust together, forced to share one cramped apartment and an uncertain future. As the characters move from distrust to friendship and from friendship to love, A Fine Balance creates an enduring panorama of the human spirit in an inhuman state.