Reviewed by Ruth Zothanpuii

Courtesy: www.stephenking.com

Born on September 21, 1947 in Portland, Maine Stephen Edwin King is the award winning  author of over 49 novels, 5 non-fiction books and nine short story collections. His father, a merchant seaman from Peru left the family when King was just 2 years old. King started writing  in January,1959 when his elder brother David and he decided to publish their own local town newspaper named Dave’s Rag on a mimeograph machine. They created a paper that sold for five cents an issue. During his sophomore year at University of Maine at Orono, King wrote a weekly column for the college newspaper. In his fist year, he also completed a novel called The Long Walk, but it was rejected by Random House. In 1967 The Glass Floor became the  first of King’s stories to be sold and professionally published.

In college, King was active in student politics and supported the anti-war movement during the Vietnam crisis.  After graduation, King though qualified to be a high school teacher was forced to take up employment as a labourer in an industrial laundry. He continued to write and sell short stories to men’s magazine. Finally in 1971, King found employment as a teacher and began writing in the evenings and on weekends. In 1974, Carrie was published and King made enough money to give up teaching and take up writing as a full time career. Over the years, many of King’s novels were made into films and he won accolades including Bram Stoker Awards, Locus Awards, and, in 2003, the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation. During the 1970s and 1980s, King also published 7 short novels under the pseudonym Richard Bachman.

Rent, Buy the following popular Stephen King novels and many others from INDIAreads Online Book Rental Library cum Bookstore.

Shawshank Redemption

Duma Key

The Stand

Pet Sematary

Cell

Agatha Christie

(15 September 1890 – 12 January 1976)

Born Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller in Devon, United Kindom, Agatha Christie needs no introduction. The youngest of three children, Agatha was initially home schooled by her mother and a series of governesses. She trained to be a singer and pianist but due to her shy nature she did not make a career of it. Duing World War 1 she worked as a nurse and then went on to work in a pharmacy; many attribute the use of poison in her novels to her experience with drugs and medicine. On Christmas Eve in 1914, Agatha married an aviator, Archibald Christie. They divorced in 1928.

Agatha started writing her first novel as a result of a challenge issued by her elder sister Madge. It was rejected by 6 publishers and took 5 years to be published.In 1920, The Mysterious Affair at Styles was  finally published and her use of poison in the mystery found mention in the Pharmaceutical Journal. Agatha met her second husband, archaeologist Max Mallowan in Baghdad in 1930. For the next 30 years she would often accompany him on digs and her experiences were reflected in her autobiographical, Come, Tell me how you Live.

Few people know that Agatha also wrote 6 romance novels under the name Mary Westmacott. Christie was the first recipient of the Mystery Writers’ of America Grand Master Award. Her novels have sold the maximum number of copies after the Bible and her books have been translated into 103 languages.

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Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay

(15 September 1876 – 16 January 1938)

Born in Hoogly, West Bengal, Sarat Chandra spent the first half of his life in poverty. He lived with his uncle in Bhagalpur and the place had a profound influence on his work. It was in Bhagalpur that Sarat Chandra wrote the novel Devdas. After his parents death, poverty forced Sarat Chandra to leave his studies and in 1903 he left to work as a clerk in Rangoon. On the eve of his departure, he submitted a short story under his uncle’s name. The story won the first prize and was published. This encourages Sarat Chandra to keep writing and soon his popularity led to an improvement in his financial situation. Sarat often wrote about the evils that plagued society (though he never consciously adopted a reformist agenda)  and was a disciple of Swami Vivekananda. He died of liver cancer in 1938.

Buy rent popular Sarat Chandra Chatterjee novels in English and Hindi from INDIAreads Online Book rental Library cum Bookstore.

Popular titles include:

Devdas

Charitraheen

Parineeta

Srikanta

Today is the birth anniversary of two famous authors. Short Story writer O’Henry known for his wit and surprise endings and D.H. Lawrence, who was embroiled in controversy due to the explicitness of his work. Join us as we dig out some little known facts about these well known authors.

O’ Henry

* O’ Henry’s real name was William Sydney Porter.

* Born in North Carolina on September 11, 1862, Porter loved reading, even as a child.

* He lost his mother at the age of three and grew up to become a pharmacist at his uncle’s drugstore. Over a  period of time he worked in many professions. he was a bank teller, a journalist, even a draftsman.

* Porter eloped and got married when his bride’s parents expressed their reluctance.

* He was good artist. He often sketched. He also joined singing and drama clubs and played both the mandolin and the guitar. In fact, he joined a singing group called the Hill City Quartet.

* Porter was charged with embezzlement by the First National bank of Austin and sentenced to five years in prison.

* He published 14 stories while in prison under different pseudonyms but then adopted the name O’ Henry.

* It was he who coined the term “banana republic.”

* The pseudonym O’Henry was first used for the story “Whistling Dick’s Christmas Stocking”.

* Porter was a heavy drinker and he died on June 5, 1910 due to cirrhosis of the liver.

David Herbert Richards Lawrence (11 September 1885 – 2 March 1930)

* Lawrence was the fourth child of a barely literate miner and a former school mistress.

* He had to quit work in a surgical appliances factory (where he was junior clerk) due to a bout of pnuemonia

* He got a teaching certificate from the University College of Nottignham and it was during his time there that he first started writing.

* Lawrence’s mother died of cancer just before his first novel The White Peacock was published and this had a profound impact on him. It was reflected in his autobiographical novel Sons and Lovers.

* In 1912, Lawrence met Frieda Weekley. She was six years his senior, had three children and was married to his former languages professor. They eloped to a disputed town in Germany. Here he was suspected of being a British spy and arrested.

* Just before the World War 1 broke out, Lawrence and Weekley returned to Britain. They were however suspected of being German spies and lived in penury.

* His poverty and the traumatic experience of the war years made Lawrence take a sabbatical and he travelled extensively, visiting Australia, Italy, Sri Lanka, and even Mexico. In 1922 , Lawrence migrated to New Mexico, United States but after a bout of malaria and tuberculosis he moved to Florence, Italy

* Lady Chatterley’s Lover was first published in private editions in Florence and Paris and reinforced his notoriety.

* Lawrence did oil painting and nine of his works can still be found hanging at the La Fonda Hotel in Taos, New Mexico.

* Lawrence died of complications due to tuberculosis at a Villa in France. His ashes are kept at a small chapel in new Mexico.

* It is believed that Lawrence’s fascination with homosexuality was a result of his strong relationship (possibly sexual) with a Cornish farmer during the World War 1.

* During his lifetime Lawrence was often charged with writing pornographic and obscene works and all his obituaries, except one by E.M. Forster were hostile.

Rent or purchase famous short stories by O’Henry or classics like The Man Who Died,  Women in Love, Sons and Lovers, Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence from INDIAreads Online Library cum Bookstore. Rental Plans start at just Rs 150 per month. Register now!

September 11, 2001. In a matter of a few minutes the world as we knew it changed. Terror and violence, blood and warfare have always been a part of human history. Yet on this day, nine years ago, the spectre of violence entered the living rooms of millions of viewers across the globe and lodged itself firmly in their hearts and minds. Words like Islamic terrorism, War on Terror, Al Qaeda, collateral damage became common currency. Here are some books that try to explain the events of September 11 and how it changed our world. We have made a conscious attempt to include books from a variety of perspectives: from the Israeli scholar to the Palestinian activist, from the “We hate war” protesters to the “let’s destroy them” supporters of war, we have tried to cover all the voices clamouring to be heard.

The 9/11 Commission Report:Final report of the National Commission on terrorist Attacks Upon the United States: In November 2002 the United States Congress and President George W. Bush established by law the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, also known as the 9/11 Commission comprising of 5 Republicans and 5 Democrats. This independent  panel was directed to examine the facts and circumstances surrounding the September 11 attacks, identify lessons learned, and provide recommendations to safeguard against future acts of terrorism. This volume is the authorized edition of the Commission’s final report and contains recommendations like supporting Musharraf, attempting to win the minds of Muslim youth etc.

The Globalization of Terror: The Challenge Of AI-Qaida And The Response Of The International Community: Written by S Yoram Schweitzer, who is a researcher at the Jaffe Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University, Israel and Shaul Shay, who heads the Israel Defense Forces’ Department of History, this book details the reasons behind September 11, the planning and the actual execution of the attack.  It purports to reveal, as well, the “organizational structure so carefully erected by Bin-Laden and his associates, in order to realize the vision of a worldwide Islamic Caliphate in practical terms.”

Descent Into Chaos : The World’s Most Unstable Region & The Threat To Global Security: This book by Lahore based Washington post journalist, Rashid Ahmed cautions that the real war against terror is being lost in central Asia where drug money is playing a huge role in sponsoring the arms race. His book reveals the “failure of nation building” in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia and the threat from radical Islam.

The War for Muslim Minds: Islam & the West: French scholar Gilles Kepel examines the impact of global terrorism and the ensuing military operations to stem its tide. He questions the United States’ ability to address the Middle East challenge with Cold War rhetoric, while revealing the fault lines in terrorist ideology and tactics. Finally, he proposes the way out of the Middle East quagmire that triangulates the interests of Islamists, the West, and the Arab and Muslim ruling elites. Kepel delineates the conditions for the acceptance of Israel, for the democratization of Islamist and Arab societies, and for winning the minds and hearts of Muslims in the West. He also says that the jihadists are losing the battle for control of Muslim minds but warns that America has misinterpreted its enemy.

Al Qaeda: The True story of Radical Islam: Delhi based British journalist for The Observer and The Guardian, Jason Burke shows how the threat from Islamic terrorism comes not from a single criminal mastermind, or even from one group. He characterizes it as a broad movement with profound roots in the politics, societies and history of the Islamic world. Using hundreds of interviews and thousands of documents, Burke shows how “Al-Qaeda” is a convenient label applied misleadingly to a diverse, disorganized global movement dedicated to fighting a “cosmic battle” with the West. This book retells the story of Al Qaeda from scratch and challenges many myths that form the very foundations of the “War on Terror.”

Covering Islam: How The Media And The Experts Determine How We See The Rest Of The World: Edward Said’s all time classic shows how our perceptions of Islam and the Islamic world are distorted due to the media’s depiction of Islam. From the Iranian hostage crisis through the Gulf War and the bombing of the World Trade Center, the American news media have portrayed “Islam” as a monolithic entity, synonymous with terrorism and religious hysteria.  Said has often been regarded as Palestine’s most vocal political voice.

Al Qaeda in Europe: This book  by Lorenzo Vidino, a European expert for the Investigative Project a Washington, DC-based Counterterrorism Institute and America’s largest private data gathering center on militant Islamic activities inspects the reach of Al Qaeda in Europe while providing an extensive historical overview of Islamic terrorist activities in Europe. Europe has become one of the key battle grounds in the global war on terror.  It is not a coincidence, in fact, that every attack planned or executed against the United States, including 9/11, has had strong European ties.

Guns & Butter: The Political Economy of International Security: This collection of articles edited by Prof. Peter Dombrowski of the US Naval war College examines the interrelationship between economics and warfare, including the events of September 11. It contains articles by E.O. Goldman and L.J. Blanken, S. Eckert, C.W. Hughesamong others

The Morality of War: A Reader: When and why is war justified? How, morally speaking, should wars be fought? The Morality of War confronts these challenging questions, surveying the fundamental principles and themes of the just war tradition through the words of the philosophers, jurists, and warriors who have shaped it.

Superpower on Crusade: A professor of political science and international studies at Portland State University, Mel Gurtov traces the sources of US missionary and expansionist tendencies and highlights their particular manifestations in the Bush administration. Turning to the war on Iraq, he focuses on real vs. stated objectives, the Pentagon s pre-eminence in shaping security policy, and the roles of Congress, the UN, and US allies. Subsequent chapters examine US policy with regard to such issues as nuclear proliferation, international law, development assistance, the environment, and human rights.

God’s Terrorists: The Wahhabi Cult And The Hidden Roots Of Modern Jihad: In this book, India born British journalist Charles Allen traces the roots of “Islamic fundamentalism” to the eighteenth century reform movement of Muhammed ibn Abd al-Wahhab and his followers. They, according to him, are the founders of modern terrorism. Read it for a right wing perspective

The Islamist: Why I Joined Radical Islam in Britain, What I saw and Why I Left:  This books by Ed Husain created ripples when it was first published in 2008. For the first time, a youngster who had joined the fundamanetalist movement came out to speak about his experiences with them and why he left them. Ed was 16 when he became a fundamentalist and 21 when he left them. this book tells his story.

Buy/Rent these and other titles on Terrorism, Conflicts, War and Understanding Islam from INDIAreads Online Library cum Bookstore!

Phyllis A. Whitney

(September 9, 1903 – February 8, 2008)

Source: www.phyllisawhitney.com

Born in Yokohama, Japan to American parents, Phyllis Ayame Whitney is often regarded as the Grand Master of Suspense novels. In a writing career spanning over 80 years, she wrote 70 novels, both for adults and young adults. Though Whitney started writing her first stories during her teenage years in the Orient, dancing was her true love and she wanted to be a dancer. Her mother encouraged her and for a time Whitney also worked as a dance instructor. At the age of 15, she went to America and she wrote and printed several short stories. It was only after her graduation in 1924  that Whitney began to take her writing more seriously. In 1941 she published her first book for young adults and in 1943, her first suspense novel. In 1961 and in 1964 she won the Edgar Award for the Best Children’s Mystery and in 1975 she became the President of the Mystery Writers’ of America. After recieving many Lifetime Achievement Awards, Whitney passed away in 2008 at the age of 104. Some of her popular works include:

Amethyst Dreams

Spindrift

Star Flight

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Peter Carey, Emma Donoghue, Damon Galgut, Howard Jacobson, Andrea Levyand Tom McCarthy have been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2010, announced Andrew Motion, former poet laureate and the Chair of judges. These authors have been selected from a long list of 16 for the following works:

Peter Carey, Parrot and Olivier in America (Faber and Faber)

Emma Donoghue, Room (Picador – Pan Macmillan)

Damon Galgut, In a Strange Room (Atlantic Books – Grove Atlantic)

Howard Jacobson, The Finkler Question (Bloomsbury)

Andrea Levy, The Long Song (Headline Review - Headline Publishing Group)

Tom McCarthy, C (Jonathan Cape – Random House)

The winner of the 2010 Man Booker Prize for Fiction will be announced on Tuesday 12 October at a dinner at London’s Guildhall and the winner will take home a cheque for £50,000. Each of the short listed authors will get £2,500 and a designer bound edition of their shortlisted book. The Prize was won by Hilary Mantel for Wolf Hall last year.

So, who are these authors who have been short listed….Here’s a little information on the short listed authors and their works.

Peter Carey: Australian novelist and short story novelist Peter Carey is the only author, apart from J.M. Coetzee to have won the Booker Prize twice. In 1988, he got the Booker for 1988 for Oscar and Lucinda, and won in 2001 for True History of the Kelly Gang. Should he win this year’s prize, he would be the first author to have won this coveted award thrice. Carey started his career with advertising and started writing novels in 1964. However it was only in 1974 that his first work was published. He has already won the Miles Franklin Award thrice and has a postage stamp released in his honor. His short listed entry, Parrot and Olivier in America “is a dazzlingly inventive reimagining of Alexis de Tocqueville’s famous journey, brilliantly evoking the Old World colliding with the New. Above all, it is a wildly funny and deeply tender portrait of two men who come to form an almost impossible friendship, and a completely improbable work of art.” (www.petercarey.com)

Emma Donoghue: Born in Dublin, Ireland, in October 1969, Emma is a playwright and novelist who took Canadian citizenship in 2004. Her 1995 novel Hood won the Stonewall Book Award (earlier known as the American Book Association’s Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Book Award) and in 2000, she received the Ferro-Grumley Award for Lesbian Fiction for Slammerkin. Her 2008 novel The Sealed Letter, was joint winner of the 2009 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction.The  youngest of eight children, Emma earned her PhD in English from the University of Cambridge. Emma’s books often explore themes of sexuality, gay and lesbian relationships.

Her entry for this year’s book is about five-year-old-Jack, to whom his eleven-by-eleven-foot room is the world. It’s where he was born, it’s where he and his Ma eat and sleep and play and learn.  Room is home to Jack, but to his mom, it’s the prison where she’s been held since she was nineteen-for seven long years.  Through her fierce love for her son, she has created a life for him in this tiny space. But Jack’s curiosity is building alongside her own desperation-and she knows that Room cannot contain either indefinitely. Told in the inventive, funny, and poignant voice of Jack, Room is a celebration of resilience-and a powerful story of a mother and son whose love lets them survive the impossible. (details @ http://www.roomthebook.com/)

Source: www.fanfiction.co.uk

Damon Galgut: Born in Pretoria in 1963, Damon Galgut is a playwright and a novelist who was diagnosed with cancer at the age of six. As he lay in the hospital for long stretches, his relatives would read him stories and it was there that his love for story telling developed. At the age of 17, his debut novel, A Sinless Season was published . In 1991, he won South Africa’s leading literary prize and in 2003 his book, The Good Doctor (written in a hotel room in Goa) was short listed for the Booker. His entry for the Booker, is a novel of longing and thwarted desire, rage and compassion; the hauntingly beautiful evocation of one man’s search for love and for a place to call home. “A young man makes three journeys that take him through Greece, India and Africa. He travels lightly, simply. To those who travel with him and those whom he meets on the way – including a handsome, enigmatic stranger, a group of careless backpackers and a woman on the edge – he is the Follower, the Lover and the Guardian. Yet, despite the man’s best intentions, each journey ends in disaster. Together, these three journeys will change his life.” (source: www.themanbookerprize.com)

Howard Jacobson: An award winning British author and journalist, Jacobson is best known for comic novels that deal with Jewish dilemmas. During the 1970s he taught English at Wolverhampton Polytechnic in the West Midlands, and this experience led him to write his first novel, Coming From Behind in 1983. He won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for The Mighty Walzer and his Kalooki Nights was longlisted for the Booker.

His entry for the Booker, The Finkler Question is a scorching story of friendship and loss, exclusion and belonging, and of the wisdom and humanity of maturity. Julian Treslove, a professionally unspectacular and disappointed BBC worker, and Sam Finkler, a popular Jewish philosopher, writer and television personality, are old school friends. Despite a prickly relationship and very different lives, they’ve never quite lost touch with each other – or with their former teacher, Libor Sevick, a Czechoslovakian always more concerned with the wider world than with exam results. Now, both Libor and Finkler are recently widowed, and with Treslove, his chequered and unsuccessful record with women rendering him an honorary third widower, they dine at Libor’s grand, central London apartment. It’s a sweetly painful evening of reminiscence in which all three remove themselves to a time before they had loved and lost; a time before they had fathered children, before the devastation of separations, before they had prized anything greatly enough to fear the loss of it. Better, perhaps, to go through life without knowing happiness at all because that way you had less to mourn? Treslove finds he has tears enough for the unbearable sadness of both his friends’ losses. And it’s that very evening, at exactly 11:30pm, as Treslove hesitates a moment outside the window of the oldest violin dealer in the country as he walks home, that he is attacked. After this, his whole sense of who and what he is will slowly and ineluctably change.

MALCOLM GLADWELL

Born on September 3, 1963 in Hampshire, UK, Malcolm Gladwell is the best selling author of books like Blink, Outliers, Tipping Point and What the Dog Saw. Inspired by his Jamaican mother who wrote a book titled, Brown face, Big Master, Gladwell became a journalist and since 1996 he has been on the staff of  The New Yorker magazine. In 2005, Time magazine included him in its list of 100 most influential people. Gladwell’s books generally deal with social psychology and all four have been best sellers.

Some of his famous quotes include:

“The key to good decision making is not knowledge. It is understanding. We are swimming in the former. We are desperately lacking in the latter.”

“Instinct is the gift of experience. The first question you have to ask yourself is, ‘On what basis am I making a judgment?’ … If you have no experience, then your instincts aren’t any good.”

“Truly successful decision-making relies on a balance between deliberate and instinctive thinking.”

“The Tipping Point is the biography  of an idea, and the idea is very simple. It is that the best way to understand the emergence of fashion trends, the ebb and flow of crime waves, or, for that matter, the transformation of unknown books into bestsellers, or the rise of teenage smoking, or the phenomena of word of mouth, or any number of the other mysterious changes that mark everyday life is to think of them as epidemics. Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do.”

“We are so caught in the myths of the best and the brightest and the self-made that we think outliers spring naturally from the earth. We look at the young Bill Gates and marvel that our world allowed that thirteen-year-old to become a fabulously successful entrepreneur. But that’s the wrong lesson. Our world only allowed one thirteen-year-old unlimited access to a time sharing terminal in 1968. If a million teenagers had been given the same opportunity, how many more Microsofts would we have today? To build a better world we need to replace the patchwork of lucky breaks and arbitrary advantages that today determine success – the fortunate birth dates and the happy accidents of history – with a society that provides opportunites for all.”

“If you work hard enough and assert yourself, and use your mind and imagination, you can shape the world to your desires”

“We are too much in awe of those who succeed and far too dismissive of those who fail. And most of all, we become much too passive. We overlook just how large a role we all play—and by “we” I mean society—in determining who makes it and who doesn’t.”

KIRAN DESAI

source: guardian.co.uk

Born on September 3, 1971 in New Delhi, Kiran Desai is the winner of the 2006 Man Booker Prize. The Daughter of famous writer Anita Desai, Kiran made a mark with her second book, The Inheritance of Loss. Her first book Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard was publishes in 1998. She is currently in a relationship with Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk.

September 5 is Teacher’s Day, the perfect time to tell your favourite Sir or Ma’am how much they mean to you. The perfect opportunity to show them that you might be naughty, you might slack on your homework or get caught passing chits in class, that you might call them names behind their back or shout in joy every time they are absent, but in your heart you know that the day when you make your mark in this world, you will look back fondly and say, To Sir, With Love….

Here are ten must read Teacher’s Day books:

1. To Sir, with Love by E.R. Braithwaite : A must read for every child and adult, this book outlines the author’s experiences as a teacher in the slums of London. At the heart of it lie many issues including racial discrimination, but what is most touching is the relationship between a teacher and his students.

2. Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom: Upon learning of his former college professor and mentor’s impending death, Mitch Albom–award-winning sportswriter, “New York Times” bestselling author, and TV commentator–visited Morrie Schwartz every week. “Tuesdays with Morrie” is Albom’s extraordinary chronicle of their time together, a book filled with laughter, sadness, joy and peace.

3. The Beautiful Tree by James Tooley: An inspiring journey into the lives of families and teachers in the poorest communities of India, Africa, and China who have successfully created their own private schools in response to failed public education. Wandering into the slums of Hyderabad’s Old City, Tooley was initially shocked to find it overflowing with small, parent-funded schools. Could these be the answer to help achieve universal education?

The Beautiful Tree movingly uncovers the efforts of poor communities in education, and finds competent, committed entrepreneurs who have started schools catering to slum children. He discovers young, engaged teachers, passionate entrepreneurs, and teaching models that work to ensure that students are engaged and learning. He finds that even among the unrecognized private schools, average teacher attendance, and English and maths proficiency surpass the apathetic government school system.

4. Three Cups of Tea and Stones in Schools by Greg Mortenson: In 1993, after a terrifying and disastrous attempt to climb K2, a mountaineer called Greg Mortenson drifted, cold and dehydrated, into an impoverished Pakistan village in the Karakoram Mountains. Moved by the inhabitants’ kindness, he promised to return and build a school. Three Cups of Tea is the story of that promise and its extraordinary outcome.Over the next decade Mortenson built not just one but fifty-five schools – especially for girls – in remote villages across the forbidding and breathtaking landscape of Pakistan and Afghanistan, just as the Taliban rose to power. His story is at once a riveting adventure and a testament to the power of the humanitarian spirit.

5. Tisha by Robert Specht: Anne Hobbs is a prim and proper 19-year-old schoolteacher who yearns for adventure. She finds this and much more in a town with the unlikely name of Chicken, located deep in the Alaskan interior. It is 1927 and Chicken is a wild mining community flaming with gold fever. Anne quickly makes friends with many of the townspeople, but is soon ostracized when she not only befriends the local Indians but also falls in love with one. A heartwarming story in the tradition of Benedict Freedman’s classic, Mrs. Mike, Tisha is one of those rare books that stays with the reader for years, beckoning to be read again and again.

6. My Teacher is My Hero by Susan Reynolds: In this collection, readers meet more than 50 great teachers who have made all the difference in their students’ lives. Each essay is written by a contributor whose experiences reflect the enormous impact a great teacher has had on his or her life.

7.  Anne of the Windy Poplars by L.M. Montgomery: Anne Shirley has left Redmond College behind to begin a new job a new chapter of her life away from Green Gables. Now she faces a new challenge:the Pringles. They’re known as the royal family of summerside – and they quickly let Anne know she is not the person they want as principal of Summerside High School. But as she settles into the cozy tower room at Windy Poplars, Anne finds she has great allies in the widows Aunt Kate and Aunt Chatty – and in their irrepressible housekeeper, Rebecca Dew. As Anne learns Summerside’s strangest secrets, winning the support of the prickly Pringles is only the first of her delicious triumphs.

8. The Awakening of Intelligence by J. Krishnamurthy: his comprehensive record of Krishnamurti’s teaching is an excellent, wide-ranging introduction to the great philosopher’s thought. Within general discussions of conflict, fear, violence, religious experience, self-knowledge, and intelligence, Krishnamurti examines specific issues, such as the role of the teacher and tradition; the need for awareness of ‘cosmic consciousness’; the problem of good and evil; and traditional Vedanta methods of help for different levels of seekers. Krishnamurti discusses these themes with Jacob Needleman, Alain Naude, and Swami Venkatasananda, among others.

9. Victoria and Abdul by Shrabani Basu: The tall handsome Abdul Karim was just twenty-four when he arrived in England from Agra to wait at tables during Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee. An assistant clerk at Agra Central Jail, he suddenly found himself a personal attendant to the Empress of India herself. Within a year, he was established as a powerful figure at court, becoming the queen’s teacher, or Munshi, and instructing her in Urdu and Indian affairs. Devastated by the death of John Brown, her Scottish gillie, the queen had at last found his replacement.

10. The Bethlehem Murders by Matt Rees: For decades, Omar Yussef has taught history to the children of Bethlehem. When a favourite former pupil, George Saba, is arrested for collaborating with the Israelis in the killing of a Palestinian guerrilla, Yussef is convinced that he has been framed. With George facing imminent execution Yussef sets out to prove his innocence.As Yussef falls foul of his headmaster and the local police chief, time begins to run out for this teacher-turned-detective. His classroom is bombed and members of his family are threatened. But with no one else willing to stand up for the truth, it is up to Omar to act, even as bloodshed and heartbreak surround him.