Gaétan Soucy, The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches, 1998

A deliberately difficult book to form any kind of mental dialogue with, its talkative narrator being a nameless teenage girl whose weird father dies in the first paragraph. With her and her brother never having been beyond the boundaries of their home, her perspective is particularly unique and discomfiting when she becomes forced to deal with the outside world. She also has a gender identity problem, and this is totally embedded into her narrative to the extent that the reader also becomes unsure, and from there the nightmare gets progressively worse. An impressive, disturbing and cunningly told story, with very menacing undercurrents.  PY

MORE ON GAÉTAN SOUCY : THE CANADIAN ENCYCLOPEDIA   |  WIKIPEDIA

Cory Doctorow, Little Brother, 2008

In the latter days of the Bush presidency Little Brother possessed that aura of a book that needed to be written, and is also Doctorow’s self-confessed “Orwell fan fiction”, involving a small group of tech-savvy teenagers who, after a terrorist attack on San Francisco, fall foul of the Department of Homeland Security in a very bad way. Beyond the pervasive surveillance and counter-hacking it deliberately veers towards a believable extreme – at its most uncomfortable points it involves Americans torturing American children. A country’s government using torture on its own youth in the name of state security isn’t new, and in the light of the US’s recent cultural nadir it’s certainly fair play to line it up alongside countries like Burma, Iran and South Africa, at least in fiction. You also don’t find many new genre books published these days with an Afterword, let alone the two that Little Brother contains, including one from Bruce Schneier. This is pitched perfectly as counterculture teenage fiction, it somehow feels right from cover to cover even though the protagonist Marcus is often talking with the know-it-all hindsight of maturity. Interestingly there is now a project under way with Burmese Americans to get Little Brother translated into four Burmese languages, but there is certainly knowledge here that could be applied by politically active citizens confronting any suppressive government around the world, democratically elected or otherwise. Unreservedly, this is a book to recommend widely.

Jane Vejjajiva, The Happiness of Kati, 2003

Kati is a nine year-old Thai girl from Ayutthaya whose hospital-bound mother is dying of Motor Neurone Disease, and the story charts her upbringing by her grandparents and how she connects to the world immediately around her and beyond, including how she chooses to deal with the possibility of reconnecting with her estranged father. The setting is unashamedly, comfortably middle class and presents an idealistic, almost perfect environment for Kati that cushions her separation from both her parents, and this blunts the story somewhat although it’s still undoubtedly realistic. The author Vejjajiva is clearly sticking to the strata with which she’s most familiar: herself cerebral palsied and wheelchair-bound, and apart from running a Thai publishing agency and translation bureau her writing also won her Thailand’s 2006 SEAWrite Award (two years before her brother became the country’s Prime Minister). The Happiness of Kati has also been translated into six languages with a Thai film adaptation released early in 2009. This gentle story also illustrates how Thai extended families can function in more close-knit ways than they do in the West. Recommended.  PY

MORE ON JANE VEJJAJIVA :  WIKIPEDIA

Lloyd Jones, Mister Pip, 2006

This 2007 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize winner was also favourite for the 2007 Man Booker, but was ultimately beaten by Anne Enright’s The Gathering. Set in Papua New Guinea during the civil war of the early 1990s, Mr. Watts, the only white man on the small island Bougainville, becomes the only schoolteacher for a group of island children and his only realia is a copy of Dickens’s Great Expectations. The pathos starts from page one and there is some admirably sensitive handling of any number of issues that carries that pathos through to the last page, with all the accompanying horrors viewed with an impressive detachment when they arise. The viewpoint of the teenage pupil Matilda is as close to authentic as Jones could reasonably be expected to get, and the three-way tension between her, her distrusting mother and Mr. Watts is to a great extent the dynamo that drives the plot. What Matilda learns from Great Expectations, and from her own life situation, is the important stuff about survival and finding the key that gives you permission to be someone else by the transformative power of fiction. Jones’s writing is clear and uncluttered; the story, including where it unexpectedly ends up, is mostly uplifting and the result is something bittersweet, something that you warm to as well as admire.  PY

MORE ON LLOYD JONES :  CONTEMPORARY WRITERS PROFILE  |  WIKIPEDIA

Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street, 1991

Esperanza Cordero is a young Mexican girl growing up in a 1960s Chicago tenement, not exactly on the wrong side of the tracks but poor nonetheless, and desolate Mango Street is the place she needs to escape from. This series of forty-six first-person vignettes captures defining moments and experiences often with pinpoint sharpness, and it’s also noticeable how the writing increases in sophistication as Esperanza becomes more mature, as her family and friends move on and her perception of her own young life becomes gradually more muted and melancholy under the gentle weight of added layers. A book that has sold three million copies worldwide, vibrantly written with prose that often captures the time and place with a near perfect clarity.  PY

MORE ON SANDRA CISNEROS : AUTHOR'S WEBSITE  |  WIKIPEDIA

Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt, Mr. Ibrahim and the Flowers of the Koran, 2001

A teenage Jew, Momo, may be stealing from Monsieur Ibrahim’s Paris shop but over time they form the kind of cross-cultural father-son relationship that both seem to have been seeking out. Ibrahim’s Sufi beliefs come across as a light-hearted and positive way of dealing with the world, while Momo seems to find them more useful than Judaism and all but converts to Islam. It has echoes of Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist but is far more engagingly written, and Schmitt’s tale (the first in his four ‘Cycle of the Unseen’ books) has also been turned into a film which would be worth seeking out. An easily-digestible story well-served by good, fluid writing.  PY

MORE ON ÉRIC-EMMANUEL SCHMITT : AUTHOR'S WEBSITE  |  WIKIPEDIA

Ian McEwan, The Cement Garden, 1978

Over a hot English summer, a family of four recently orphaned children avoid being taken into care by not telling anyone of their bereavement, instead choosing to fend for themselves. Narrated by the morose teenager Jack, The Cement Garden is soaked in an authentic atmosphere of a boring 1970s British adolescence, but their unguided excursions into premature adulthood would probably be treated as farcical and troubling comedy if they were from a less finely-tuned author. The setting seems as familiar and mundane as McEwan could possibly make it (notwithstanding the sibling sexual tension and the problem of how they dispose of certain incriminating evidence), and for a first novel it’s as dry as dust in its cold and disturbing perfection.  PY

MORE ON IAN McEWAN : AUTHOR'S WEBSITE  |  WIKIPEDIA

Manuel Rivas, Butterfly’s Tongue, 1995

Three short stories that have the common theme of young Spanish men or boys viewing the adult world from the outside. Two of the stories, ‘Saxophone in the Mist’ and ‘Carmiña’ revolve around first encounters with music and sex, though particularly good is ‘Butterfly’s Tongue’, about a young schoolboy who admires his old teacher with whom he shares a love of nature, and yet for reasons of the Spanish Civil War is encouraged by his father to turn against him. This trio was also made into a film which is certainly worth seeking out. Rivas is a delicately observant writer.  PY

MORE ON MANUEL RIVAS : WIKIPEDIA

Tim Winton, Blueback, 1997

In the waters of the reefs near his Queensland home, 10 year-old Abel Jackson encounters an old grouper, a creature that inspires his sense of wonder and who becomes a ‘friend’ he keeps returning to as he passes through school, university and out into the world as a marine biologist. Blueback is a pearl-like fable for kids and adults; Winton doesn’t put a foot wrong, and he pitches a well-aimed ecological message to wake people up to Australia’s natural heritage that is both taken for granted and casually endangered. A great place to start reading Tim Winton, it reminded me of Peter Benchley’s The Girl of the Sea of Cortez in its intent, only this is far better.  PY

Rigoberta Menchú & Dante Liano, The Girl from Chimel, 2000

Rigoberta Menchú won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992 for her work on the human rights of indigenous peoples, and here she combines her family history with an illumination of ancient Mayan fables. These short tales have a gentle simplicity as seen through childhood eyes, capturing the innocence of her rural life before Guatemala descended into its 36-year civil war. A brief but refreshingly positive read.   PY

Uzodinma Iweala, Beasts of No Nation, 2005

A heart-felt, first-person tale of a West African child soldier cynically conscripted to fight the people who murdered his parents, his journey instead becoming a lawless journey from town to town in an orgy of murder, robbery and rape. It didn’t quite extract from me the degree of sympathy I was expected to feel towards the unfortunate and far-too-young narrator, being rather predictable in its direction and the author’s overstated aim to make a visceral impression, but it’s a bracing novel and particularly worth reading for the consistent idiomatic African English Uzodinma Iweala uses. Not for the faint-hearted.   PY

•  Beasts of No Nation was nominated for the 2005  James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction.

Meher Pestonji, Sadak Chhaap, 2005

‘Sadak chhaap’ means ‘street kid’ in colloqial Hindi, and this charts five years in the life of Rahul, one of Mumbai’s many thousands. The book opens with him discovering a baby girl wrapped in newspaper on a railway station, but this hint of a plot-in-the-making is dropped in favour of Rahul’s ups and downs as he frequently tries to makes good before regularly letting himself go, preferring the unstructured freedom that street life offers. This spirals down into drug abuse and paedophilia while friends watch on in despair. Realistic in its rather plotless form, one is often left wondering where the book will end up though Pestonji is thankfully uncompromising in her refusal to provide a fairytale ending.   PY

•  Meher Pestonji has campaigned extensively for a change in rape laws, housing rights for slum-dwellers, and a more sensitive understanding of street children and their special needs. She lives in Mumbai.