The book''s main protagonist is Nicholas "Nick" Twisp, a 14-year-old boy of above-average intelligence. Nick''s life continues like a normal teenager''s with his best friend Leroy, a.k.a. Lefty, and his divorced parents George and Estelle. His mother is dating a truck driver named Jerry, who sells a group of sailors a Chevy Nova that dies soon after the sailors get it. In response, the sailors go for revenge. After outsmarting them, Jerry strategically decides to take a vacation, so they all go to a religious mobile home camp. It is there that Nick meets Sheridan "Sheeni" Saunders and his life is turned completely upside down. Through plots to get Sheeni closer to him he ends up with several crimes on his hands and is forced to run from the police. Nick tricks everyone into thinking he went to India, thereby escaping the police. Nick hides out with his sister Joanie and returns with help from his friend in Ukiah, Frank "Fuzzy" DeFalco. He dresses in Fuzzy''s late grandmother''s clothes, adopting the name Carlotta and a conservative disposition. As Nick does so, he befriends Sheeni and several other people who Nick knew before. While spending the night with Sheeni on Christmas Eve, she reveals to him that she knew from the beginning it was him, not Carlotta. Nick then gets "the best Christmas present a youth could receive," starting a secret relationship with Sheeni. Nick inherits a fortune when an elderly neighbor of Joanie takes a liking to him and decides to put him in her will. When Joanie''s neighbor died, Nick is briefly left half a million dollars richer, until his mother''s boyfriend, a somewhat corrupt police officer, seizes the money. Faced with homelessness from the loss of the house he had been squatting in, Nick becomes rich beyond belief when an idea of his, a wart watch, makes it big.

Youth in Revolt

The story opens as fifteen year old Cait recounts events occurring a year before on her small island home, Hale, which is roughly four miles long and two miles across at its greatest extent. She begins her story by explaining when she first met Lucas, a mysterious teenager who has traveled to the island to explore and live for a short time period. On the same day that she first sees Lucas, her brother returns home and she is nearly assaulted by another islander, Jamie Tait. However, Lucas is not accepted into the island community easily, due to the discrimination he receives at the hands of the town folk. He works a few odd jobs, but is the victim of attempted assault, forcing him to defend himself and earn a negative reputation. Primarily this comes from Jamie Tait, a university student and popular islander from a wealthy family. The negative behavior escalates when Lucas rescues a young girl from drowning during a town festival, but is met with accusations of molestation. Lucas is forced into hiding. However, he feels an urge to visit Cait one last time. Unfortunately, Jamie has decided to frame Lucas for the rape, assault and attempted murder of a promiscuous islander named Angel, who had befriended Bill, Cait''s old best friend. The novel climaxes as the islanders attempt to capture Lucas, who is innocent of the crime.

Lucas

Canyons is a book about two boys. One boy is named Coyote Runs (age 14) and the other boy is Brennan Cole (age 15). The story starts with Brennan making a short narrative about his life and switches back and forth from Brennan and Coyote Runs. Later in the story, the switching ends when Coyote Runs gets shot in the head during his first raid that would, if successful, will make him a man among his Apache tribe. However, he is shot by American soldiers and dies instantly. Nearly two hundred years later, Brennan finds his skull with a bullet hole in its forehead, and becomes obsessive of it. From that point on in the novel, a mystical link connects Brennan''s mind with Coyote Runs'' spirit. After talking to his old biology teacher, he runs sixty miles in a day and a night to retrieve the skull to the top of a canyon - a place Coyote Runs calls his “medicine place." After a grueling run and chased by so-called rescuers, he gets Coyote Runs'' skull back to his medicine place ending the bond and the novel.

Canyons

Umarao Jaan is born as Amiran () to a modest family in Faizabad. After the criminal Dilawar Khan is released from jail he decides to get revenge as her father witnessed against him in court. Khan kidnaps Amiran and decides to sell her in Lucknow. She is imprisoned with another girl, Ram Dai, but the two are separated when Dilawar Khan takes her to Lucknow. There she is sold for 150 rupees to Khanum Jaan, the head tawaif of a kotha. She is renamed Umrao and begins to study classical music and dance. Together with the other apprentice tawaif and Gauhar Mirza, the mischievous illegitimate son of a local Nawab, she is taught to read and write in both Urdu and Persian. As Umrao grows up, she is surrounded by a culture of luxury, music and poetry. She eventually gains her first client, (earning her the suffix of jaan) but prefers the impoverished Gauhar Mirza, her friend. Umrao Jaan attracts the handsome and wealthy Nawab Sultan. The couple fall in love, but after a jealous customer tries to start a fight with Nawab Sultan, he shoots him and the jealous customer Zabardast Khan dies. He no longer comes to the kotha and Umrao Jaan must meet him secretly, by the help of Gauhar Mirza. As Umrao Jaan continues to see Nawab Sultan and also serve other clients, she supports Gauhar Mirza with her earnings. A new client, the mysterious Faiz Ali, showers Umrao Jaan with jewels and gold, but warns her not to tell anyone about his gifts. When he invites her to travel to Farrukhabad, Khanum Jaan refuses so Umrao Jaan must run away. On the way to Farrukhabad, they are attacked by soldiers and Umrao Jaan discovers that Faiz is a dacoit and all of his gifts have been stolen goods. Faiz Ali escapes with his brother Fazl Ali and she is imprisoned, but luckily one of the tawaif from Khanum Jaan''s kotha is in the service of the Raja whose soldiers arrested her so Umrao Jaan is freed. As soon as she leaves the Raja''s court, Faiz Ali finds her and gets her to come with him. He is soon captured and Umrao Jaan, reluctant to return to Khanum Jaan, sets up as a tawaif in Kanpur. While she is performing in the house of a kindly Begum, armed bandits led by Fazl Ali try to rob the house, but leave when they see that Umrao Jaan is there. Then Gauhar Mirza comes to Kanpur and she decides to return to the kotha. Umrao Jaan performs at the court of Wajid Ali Shah until the Siege of Lucknow forces her to flee the city for Faizabad. There she finds her mother, but is threatened by her brother who considers her a disgrace and believes she would be better off dead. Devastated, Umrao Jaan returns to Lucknow now that the mutiny is over. She meets the Begum from Kanpur again in Lucknow and discovers that she is actually Ram Dai. By a strange twist of fate Ram Dai was sold to the mother of Nawab Sultan and the two are now married. Another ghost of Umrao Jaan''s past is put to rest when Dilawar Khan is arrested and hung for robbery. With her earnings and the gold that Faiz Ali gave her, she is able to live comfortably and eventually retires from her life as a tawaif.

Umrao Jaan Ada

The book begins with Elansa Sungold going to the border to heal a group of trees with her Blue Phoenix, a magical artifact passed down since the Age of Dreams to woodshapers in her family. The Blue Phoenix is a symbol of Habbakuk, and the artifact may be a holy artifact of Habbakuk. She is guarded by twenty elves. When they reach further into the forest, they are ambushed by goblins, which were hired by human brigands. Elansa is taken for ransom, and one of the guards who were sent to take care of her by her husband, Prince Kethrenan, is mutilated and sent back to Qualinost, the elve''s homeland, to inform them of the ransom demand, two cartloads full of the best weapons that the elves have. Elansa is taken to one of the bandits secret hideouts, and is guarded by Char, the dwarf. Brand, the leader of the bandits, also takes Elansa''s Blue Phoenix from her. In the hands of a human, it didn''t pulse with magic at all, so humans would think it''s just a pretty shaped gem. Brand means raven in an ancient dialect. Brand kills the son of Gnash, a hobgoblin, who was sent to assist the ambush, making him an enemy of the goblins. They run from the goblins into many different secret hideouts, then hole up in one for the winter. In the sprain, Brand''s demand for two wagons full of weapons has been acknowledged. Prince Kethrenan, and his cousin, a female warrior, drive the wagons, while other warriors hide in the woods. Their plan is to slaughter the bandits when they come to take the weapons, however, their plans are foiled when goblins, this time enemies of both, appear. Brand and his band get away with Elansa and the two wagons, leaving the elves to "mop up" the goblins. Brand stores the weapons in caches all over the stone lands, so that they won''t be discovered. A goblin "turncoat" decides to help the elves, and with his help the locate all of the weapon caches. The weapons that can''t be recovered due to transportation issues are destroyed. By plotting the caches on a map, the elves discover an arrow pointing to Pax Tharkas, perhaps the last safe house for the brigands, so the elves head to Pax Tharkas. Brand and his band know that they are being hunted, but not by whom, so they decide to go to the abandoned Pax Tharkas as a safe haven. During this time, Char becomes almost a friend of Elansa''s. Many of the men in the group of bandits want Elansa, so Brand gives her a choice between him and them. He was just doing this to protect her, but she didn''t know that. Elansa chooses Brand. The goblins amass an army and also head to Pax Tharkas, following Brand. Brand and his followers arrive in Pax Tharkas, and a couple of goblins manage to rouse the undead guarding Kith-Kanan. While Elansa is trying to help the Bandits to destroy the undead, one of the bandits try to rape her, but Char saves her. Elansa uses her Blue Phoenix to destroy the undead, but she faints from the strain afterwards. The elves and goblins fight outside Pax Tharkas, and the elves destroy the goblins. Prince Kethrenan''s cousin is killed. Prince Kethrenan comes in to rescue Elansa, but Elansa wants him to spare Brand. He refuses, kills Brand, and at the same time Leyerlain Starwing kills Kethrenan by throwing a dagger into his neck. At this point, Elansa realizes that she grew to love Brand. Elansa runs away with Char, before the elves come to investigate. She''s pregnant with Brand''s child, and Char convinces her to claim that she was raped to protect herself and the child, even though Brand grew, almost, to be her lover. She returns to Qualinesti. The child is known as Tanis Half-Elven.

The Inheritance

The book is narrated in the first person, in the manner of a coming-of-age story, or Bildungsroman. The protagonist, tracing his life from early childhood, is Omon Krivomazov, born in Moscow in the post-World War II years. In his teenage years, the realization strikes him that he must break free of Earth''s gravity to free himself of the demands of the Soviet society and the rigid ideological confines of the state. After finishing high school, he immediately enrolls in a military academy. Omon soon finds that the academy does not, in fact, create future pilots, but instead exposes cadets to a series of treacherous trials, beginning with the amputation of both of their feet, so they can manifest Soviet heroism. This military school pecularities are coming as a reference to a famous Soviet ace-pilot Alexey Maresyev, who despite being badly injured in a plane crash after a dogfight, managed to return to the Soviet-controlled territory on his own. During his 18-day long journey, his injuries deteriorated so badly that both of his legs had to be amputated below the knee. Desperate to return to his fighter pilot career, he subjected himself to nearly a year of exercise to master the control of his prosthetic devices, and succeeded at that, returning to flying in June 1943. In the book, before such intentional "amputation" happens, though, Omon and his friend are whisked out of the academy into a top-secret installation under KGB headquarters in Moscow, where they start preparing for an "unmanned" mission to the Moon - he is told that to substitute for researching, building and launching an automated probe, the Party prefers people, trained for "heroism", to fulfill the tasks nominally performed by machines, such as rocket stage separation, space vehicle course correction and so on. Soon Omon indeed seems to be launched to the Moon, strapped into a seat inside a Lunokhod, which he is meant to drive like a bicycle on the lunar surface, as the last piece in the space mission puzzle, in order to deliver a radio beacon to a specific point and activate it. This he does, even though his protection against the vacuum and the interstellar cold, once he leaves the confines of the hermetically sealed Lunokhod, consists of a cotton-filled overcoat and "special hydrocompensatory tampons" stuffed up his nose. However, when it comes the time for him to shoot himself after placing the beacon, as ordered, the gun he was given for that purpose misfires, and he finds himself not on the Moon at all, but in an abandoned subway tunnel, where he had been driving his Lunokhod all along, carefully ignoring all signs which might have given him a clue as to his real whereabouts. He tries to escape, is given chase, but manages to find his way into the "normal" world again, coming up into one of the stations of the Moscow Metro. One of Omon''s "teachers" explains the idea behind the charade. The idea is that even if the fact that the Soviet Union is a champion of peaceful space exploration holds true only inside a person''s head (namely, the hero''s; no one knows of him or his mission apart from its organizers), this is not much different from it being the reality. The reality, when it concerns subjects not capable of being experienced, is in fact only a perception formed in people''s consciousness, and can be manipulated to the extent that the question of "true" version of events becomes meaningless (this idea juxtaposes with the conspiracy theories concerning the moon landing by the United States astronauts, even though the latter is never mentioned in the novel). The book met with a significant success in the early post-Soviet cultural landscape and continues to be reprinted with the later works by Pelevin.

Omon Ra

Chris Jaynes is the only African-American professor of literature at a liberal Manhattan college. Refusing to limit his teaching to the African-American canon and serve on the college diversity committee, he is denied tenure. The quest is led by the protagonist''s older cousin Captain Booker Jaynes, "the world''s only civil rights activist turned deep-sea diver", who is planning on mining blocks of Antarctic ice to melt and sell as expensive bottled water. with a fondness for Little Debbie snack cakes, joins the team in the hope of finding landscape painter Thomas Karvel, "Master of Light" (a parody of Thomas Kinkade, "Painter of Light"), and in part, Pym is laid out as "a road story/bromance between Jaynes and his childhood pal." Other members of the expedition include water treatment engineers Jeffree and Carlton Damon Carter, a gay couple documenting the trip for their "Afro-adventure blog." Angela Latham, a lawyer and Jaynes''s "much-pined-for" ex-girlfriend, brings along her new husband Nathaniel, treating the venture as a honeymoon. But instead of the black inhabitants described by Poe, Jaynes and his friends come across "a prehistoric world of giant white people, or ''Snow Honkies'', who enslave them."

In The Flopsy Bunnies, Benjamin Bunny and Peter Rabbit are adults, and Benjamin has married his cousin Flopsy. The couple are the parents of six children generally called The Flopsy Bunnies. Benjamin and Flopsy are "very improvident and cheerful" and have some difficulty feeding their many children. At times, they turn to Peter Rabbit (who has gone into business as a florist and keeps a nursery garden), but there are days when Peter cannot spare cabbages.In the original frontispiece to the tale, a sign over the garden tended by Peter and his mother reads, "Peter Rabbit and Mother &mdash; Florists &mdash; Gardens neatly razed. Borders devastated by the night or year". The illustration was eventually replaced (probably in the third printing) because of the difficulty in lettering the noticeboard in non-English editions (MacDonald 1986, p. 40;Linder 1976, plate 8). It is then that the Flopsy Bunnies cross the field to Mr. McGregor''s rubbish heap of rotten vegetables. One day they find and feast on lettuces that have shot into flower, and, under their "soporific" influence, fall asleep in the rubbish heap. Mr. McGregor discovers them by surprise and places them in a sack and ties it shut then sets the sack aside while attending to another matter. Benjamin and Flopsy are unable to help their children, but a "resourceful" wood mouse called Thomasina Tittlemouse, gnaws a hole in the sack and the bunnies escape. Their parents fill the sack with rotten vegetables, and the animals hide under a bush to observe Mr. McGregor''s reaction. McGregor does not notice the substitution, and carries the sack home. His wife claims the skins for herself, intending to line her old cloak with them, but when she reaches into the sack and discovers the rotten vegetables, she accuses her husband of playing a trick on her. A vegetable marrow is thrown through the window, hitting the youngest of the eavesdropping bunnies. Their parents decide it is time to go home. At Christmas, they send the heroic little wood mouse a quantity of rabbit-wool. She makes herself a cloak and a hood, and a muff and mittens. Scholar M. Daphne Kutzer points out that Mr. McGregor''s role is larger in The Flopsy Bunnies than in the two previous rabbit books, but he inspires less fear in The Flopsy Bunnies than in Peter Rabbit because his role as fearsome antagonist is diminished when he becomes a comic foil in the book''s final scenes. Nonetheless, for young readers, he is still a frightening figure because he has captured not only vulnerable sleeping bunnies but bunnies whose parents have failed to adequately protect them.

The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies

The Prophecy of Blood on a scroll given to him by Nerissa. Soon, a message from Vikus arrives in the laundry room with the announcement that the "Curse of the Warmbloods is upon us". Gregor and his father travel to Central Park and the entrance underneath and meet Ripred, who informs him that the Curse of the Warmbloods is a plague scouring the Underland, and that all warmbloods have united in order to find a cure. Gregor is uncertain that his mother will let him and Boots go, but Ripred encourages him by informing him his own bond, Ares, is a victim of the plague, and adding that if his mother does not comply, the rats will send an escort. Back at their apartment, Gregor''s mother will not let them go, but Ripred''s escort arrives in the form of hundreds of normal-sized rats in the walls. After being overwhelmed, his mother agrees to go on the condition that she come too (this is the first time she goes to the Underland). They meet the bat Nike, daughter of Queen Athena, in the laundry room and fly to Regalia, where delegations of cockroaches, rats, bats, and humans have gathered. The humans inform the other species that there is a cure for the plague, starshade, found deep in the Vineyard of Eyes. The rats agree to lend their assistance on one condition: that a yellow powder used to keep fleas, plague carriers, away be sent to the rats. A bat flies in from the Dead Lands, plague ridden, and fleas force the audience to retreat, but not before Gregor''s mother is bitten. Gregor, Boots, Ripred, Nike, Temp, Solovet, and two rats named Lapblood and Mange agree to journey to the Vineyard of Eyes. When they enter the jungles, they are greeted by Hamnet, Luxa''s long lost uncle, his Halflander(half Overlander, half Underlander) son Hazard, and a lizard, Frill. Hamnet agrees to be a guide, but only if Solovet does not come. The pack enters the jungle and run through several trials, such as flesh eating plants, which kill Mange, and quicksand, before arriving at the end and meeting Luxa and Aurora, who had been hiding with the mice the whole time. They make it into the Vineyard of Eyes, but ants destroy the field of starshade and kill Hamnet and Frill, leaving no hope of a cure. Temp mentions offhandedly that "unless this be, not the cradle, unless this be" making them realize there is still hope for a cure. Gregor realizes that Ares did not contract the plague from the mites, as thought, but in a laboratory, and it leads him to believe that the plague was invented by the humans. Luxa is horrified, but Ripred thinks it fits and orders that the first cures be sent to the rats. The plague was actually ordered by Solovet, Regent of Regalia and wife of Vikus, as a military weapon for killing. Back in Regalia, they have developed a cure, and Luxa exposes the project. Nerissa reveals to Gregor that had the quest never happened, the plague cure would never have been given to the gnawers, and so their journey was not in vain. Gregor''s mother cannot return to the surface without risking carrying the plague to the Overland, and so the book ends with Gregor confiding in Mrs. Cormaci in order to enlist her help.

Gregor and the Curse of the Warmbloods

The book concerns the story of Sethe and her daughter Denver after their escape from slavery. Their home, I24 Bluestone Road, Cincinnati, is haunted by a revenant, whom they believe to be the ghost of Sethe''s daughter. Because of the haunting —- which often involves objects being thrown around the room —- Sethe''s youngest daughter, Denver, is shy, friendless, and housebound, and her sons, Howard and Buglar, have run away from home by the time they are thirteen years old. Soon afterward, Baby Suggs, the mother of Sethe''s husband Halle, dies in her bed. Paul D, one of the slaves from Sweet Home, the plantation where Baby Suggs, Sethe, her spouse Halle, and several other slaves once worked, arrives at 124. He tries to bring a sense of reality into the house. He also tries to make the family forget the past. In doing so, he forces out the spirit. At first, he seems to be successful, even bringing the family, including the housebound Denver, out of the house for the first time in years. However, on their way back, they encounter a young woman sitting in front of the house. She calls herself Beloved. Paul D, suspicious, warns Sethe, but charmed by the young woman, Sethe ignores him. Paul D is gradually forced out of Sethe''s home by a supernatural presence. When made to sleep outside in a shed, he is cornered by Beloved. While Paul D has sex with her, his mind is filled with horrific memories from his past. Overwhelmed with guilt, Paul D tries to tell Sethe about it but cannot and instead says he wants her pregnant. Sethe is elated, and Paul D resists Beloved and her influence over him. But, when he tells friends at work about his plans to start a new family, they react fearfully. Stamp Paid reveals the reason for the community''s rejection of Sethe. When Paul D asks Sethe about it, she tells him what happened. After escaping from Sweet Home and making it to her mother-in-law''s home where her children were waiting, Sethe was found by her master, who attempted to reclaim Sethe and her children. Sethe grabbed her children, ran into the tool shed and tried to kill them all, succeeding only with her oldest daughter. Sethe explains to Paul D, saying she was "trying to put my babies where they would be safe." The revelation is too much for him, and he leaves. Without Paul D, the sense of reality and time moving forward disappears. Sethe comes to believe that the girl, Beloved, is the daughter she murdered when the girl was only two years old; her tombstone reads only "Beloved". Sethe begins to spend carelessly and spoil Beloved out of guilt. Beloved becomes angry and more demanding, throwing tantrums when she doesn''t get her way. Beloved''s presence consumes Sethe''s life to the point where she becomes depleted and sacrifices her own need for eating, while Beloved grows bigger and bigger. In the climax of the novel, Denver, the youngest daughter, reaches out and searches for help from the black community. Some of the village women arrive at 124 to exorcise Beloved. At the same time, the white man who helped Sethe and Halle in their escape comes to pick up Denver who is beginning work with him that day. Sethe attacks the white man with an ice pick and is brought down by the village women; in the meantime Beloved disappears from I24While Sethe is confused and has a "rememory" of her master coming again, Beloved disappears. The novel resolves with Denver becoming a working member of the community and Paul D returning to Sethe and pledging his love. At the outset, the reader is caused to assume that Beloved is a supernatural, incarnate form of Sethe''s murdered daughter. Later, Stamp Paid reveals the story of "a girl locked up by a white man over by Deer Creek. Found him dead last summer and the girl gone. Maybe that''s her". Both are possible by the text. Beloved sings a song Sethe believes to be known only to her and her children; elsewhere, she speaks of a pair of earrings and asks Sethe what happened to them. The second section of the novel, however, contains memories of Beloved''s that seem to corroborate the possibility that she is the escaped girl from Deer Creek.

Beloved

Timothy Meeker is a young man who lives in the town of Redding, Connecticut around the time the American Revolution begins. Tim does not exactly care about politics, but his father, Eliphalet ("Life"), is a loyalist to Great Britain, much like the rest of the town. His entire family welcomes his brave and high-strung teenage brother, Sam, when he returns from Yale. However, his father is outraged when he learns that Sam has joined the Continental Army to fight against the British. Unlike Tim, Sam is not afraid to voice his opinions, and this causes him to eventually be forced out from the family tavern (their home and business). After this, Sam steals his father''s Brown Bess to use as a weapon during battles. Sam leaves Redding to fight, and things become harder, gradually separating the family. Sam occasionally returns, although when this happens, Tim is the only one who talks with him. In one instance, Tim delivers a "business letter" to New York for a "moderate" neighbor named Mr. Heron, against his father''s wishes, since he does not trust Heron. Betsy Read, Tim and Sam''s friend, opens the letter, only to find it is a "test note" that says: If you receive this message, then the messenger is reliable, meaning that the future letters will be spy reports on soldiers. Tim throws away the note. Meanwhile, prices of food and drinks go up and the redcoats even show up in Redding to take weapons and fight the few Patriots there. After seeing the bloody battle, in which one of Tim''s friends, an innocent slave named Ned, is decapitated, and another friend, an innocent child named Jerry Stanford, is captured by the British, Tim begins to have stronger feelings about the Patriots. While on a trip with his father to sell beef to loyalists in New York, they are stopped by a band of cowboys who presumably abduct him. Tim goes home, and the next year finds his father has died on a prison ship due to an outbreak of cholera. After this, Tim''s mother, Susannah, begins to drink heavily. Sam returns, only to reveal he has been framed for stealing cattle and he is going to be executed by his own army in a warning to soldiers who may do the same thing if faced by extreme hunger. The story then cuts to 1826, where Tim reveals he has survived the Revolution, and that he has written the entire story to tell what life was like in the war. He expresses his condolences about Sam, and then reveals he has a happy life.

My Brother Sam Is Dead

Battle Royale takes place in 1997 in an alternate timeline—Japan is a member region of a totalitarian state known as the . Under the guise of a "study trip", a group of students from in the fictional town of Shiroiwa, in Kagawa Prefecture, are gassed on a bus. They awaken in the Okishima Island School on Okishima, an isolated, evacuated island southwest of Shodoshima (modeled after the island of Ogijima). They learn that they have been placed in an event called the Program. Officially a military research project, it is a means of terrorizing the population, of creating such paranoia as to make organized insurgency impossible. The first Program was held in 1947. Fifty third-year junior high school classes are selected (prior to 1950, forty-seven classes were selected) annually to participate in the Program for research purposes. The students from a single class are isolated and are required to fight the other members of their class to the death. The Program ends when only one student remains, with that student being declared the winner and receiving a government funded pension. Their movements are tracked by metal collars, which contain tracking and listening devices; if any student should attempt to escape the Program, or enter declared forbidden zones (which are randomly selected at the hours of 12 and 6, both a.m. and p.m.), a bomb will be detonated in the collar, killing the wearer. If no one dies within any 24-hour period, all collars will be detonated simultaneously and there will be no winner. After being briefed about the Program, the students are issued survival packs that include a map, compass, food and water, and a random weapon or other item, which may be anything from a gun to a paper fan. During the briefing, two students (Fumiyo Fujiyoshi and Yoshitoki Kuninobu) anger the supervisor, Kinpatsu Sakamochi, who kills both. As the students are released onto the island, they each react differently to their predicament; beautiful delinquent Mitsuko Souma murders those who stand in her way using deception, Hiroki Sugimura attempts to find his best friend and his secret love, Kazuo Kiriyama attempts to win the game by any means necessary (stemming from his lack of ability to feel human emotion due to a partial lobotomy caused by a car crash while in utero) and Shinji Mimura makes an attempt to escape with his best friend, class clown Yutaka Seto. In the end, four students remain: protagonist Shuya Nanahara, Noriko Nakagawa (the crush of Shuya''s best friend), Shogo Kawada—a survivor of a previous instance of the Program—and antagonist Kazuo Kiriyama. Following a car chase and shoot-out between Kazuo and the main characters, Noriko kills Kazuo by shooting him, but to absolve the quiet and naturally good-natured Noriko of any guilt, Shogo then shoots Kazuo, claims he is in fact responsible for Kazuo''s death, and then takes his two partners to a hill. After telling Shuya and Noriko that he will kill them, Shogo shoots in the air twice, faking their deaths for the microphones planted on the collars. He then dismantles the collars using information he had previously hacked into the government servers to obtain. Shogo boards the winner''s ship, as do Shuya and Noriko, covertly, a short while later. On the ship, Shogo kills Sakamochi and a soldier, while Shuya kills the other soldiers on board. Shogo tells Shuya how to escape, succumbs to his wound from the battle with Kiriyama and dies. The two remaining students return to the mainland and attempt to travel to find a clinic belonging to a friend of Shogo''s father. From there, they make plans to escape to the U.S., facing an uncertain future as they run from the authorities who have spotted them as they try to board a train.

Over 8000 Takeaways For Your Brain!

Read - Listen - Learn

Youth in Revolt

By C.D. Payne

Lucas

No Author Listed

Canyons

By Gary Paulsen

Umrao Jaan Ada

By Mirza Hadi Ruswa

The Inheritance

By Nancy Varian Berberick

Omon Ra

By Victor Pelevin

Pym

By Mat Johnson

The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies

By Beatrix Potter

Gregor and the Curse of the Warmbloods

By Suzanne Collins

Beloved

By Toni Morrison

My Brother Sam Is Dead

By Christopher Collier

Battle Royale

By Koushun Takami