South of the Border, West of the Sun - Haruki Murakami

The first impression I got from reading this book is that Haruki Murakami is the M. Night Shyamalan of novelists. If you read this all the way to the end, you'll see what I mean.

To briefly describe the plot without major spoilers, it focuses on the life of Hajime, a Japanese boy living in a small town. One of his classmates is a girl called Shinamoto who he starts a friendship towards because they're both only children and she suffers from polio, which is why the teacher asked him to accompany her around the school. They both drift apart and never encounter each other again but she is always on Hajime's mind well into his twenties, which were the most bleak part of his life.

The story fast-forwards to when Hajime is 36. He's a far happier married man with two children and the owner of two trendy and very successful jazz bars in Aoyama, Tokyo. Everything is going great for him until Shinamoto visits his bar one evening...

Kensuke's Kingdom - Michael Morpurgo

This book I had to read at elementary school but it was one of the ones where I read far ahead of the class (then later got told off for it).

It's told from the first person perspective and is about a 11 year old boy named Michael who lives a normal life in Hampshire and recalls himself playing football with friends. His family decide to take him and the family dog, Stella Artois (Not kidding with that name) on a voyage around the world in their yacht, the Peggy Sue.

After falling from the yacht into the ocean during a violent storm, Michael washes up on an unknown island somewhere in the Pacific. After discovering that food has been left out for him, he grows suspicious. He is stopped from lighting a signal fire by a man living on the island, then soon encounters the man again who teaches him how to survive in the wild. The man reveals himself to be a naval doctor from Japan who survived World War II and heard of the bombing of his home, Nagasaki.

Eventually, a boat comes and they both light a signal fire, draw its attention and Michael is rescued. Kensuke stays on the island and Michael makes a promise to him not to tell anybody of his presence on the island at least over the next decade.

The epilogue raises the question of whether this was actually based on a true story in Michael Morpurgo's childhood because it shows letters to and from Kensuke's family bringing the news that Kensuke is alive and well.

To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee Collins

Michael Gove recently announced he was going to take this off the UK English Literature curriculum at schools because he wanted there to be more British books. It's a shame, really. It's one of those books that shows you just how bad mid 20th Century America was in terms of racism and why there was a civil rights movement in the first place. It was the kind of place where if a black worker were grossly underpaid for a day of work then told his employer "I think you made a mistake"; he'd be beaten to an inch of his life.