Summer Reading 2023: Upper School

In the early 1900s, teenaged Sunja, the adored daughter of a crippled fisherman, falls for a wealthy stranger at the seashore near her home in Korea. He promises her the world, but when she discovers she is pregnant–and that her lover is married–she refuses to be bought. Instead, she accepts an offer of marriage from a gentle, sickly minister passing through on his way to Japan. But her decision to abandon her home, and to reject her son's powerful father, sets off a dramatic saga that will echo down through the generations. From bustling street markets to the halls of Japan's finest universities to the pachinko parlors of the criminal underworld, Lee's complex and passionate characters–strong, stubborn women, devoted sisters and sons, fathers shaken by moral crisis–will stay with you. Richly told and profoundly moving, Pachinko is a story of love, sacrifice, ambition, and loyalty.

You can find the miniseries version of Pachinko on Apple TV+, directed by Kogonada and Justin Chon, and starring and Lee Min-ho and Best Supporting Actress Oscar-winner Youn Yuh-jung

Frank Herbert's classic masterpiece is a triumph of the imagination and one of the bestselling science fiction novels of all time. Set on the desert planet Arrakis, Dune is the story of Paul Atreides, the young heir to a noble family tasked with ruling an inhospitable world. Arrakis is treacherous, but it is also the source of the "spice" melange, a drug capable of extending life and enhancing consciousness. Coveted across the known universe, melange is a prize worth killing for... and someone does. When House Atreides is betrayed, the destruction of Paul's family will set the boy on a journey toward a destiny greater than he could ever have imagined.

Directed by Denis Villeneuve, Dune: Part I came out in 2021 and stars Timothée Chalamet, Oscar Isaac, Rebecca Ferguson, and Jason Momoa. Dune: Part II will come out at the end of 2023, and Zendaya, Florence Pugh, and Austin Butler will join the cast.

See for yourself why Kazuo Ishiguro has received so many literary accolades, including the Booker Prize in 1989 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017. His sixth novel, Never Let Me Go, is a moving, suspenseful, and quasi-science fiction classic. As children, Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy were students at Hailsham, an exclusive boarding school secluded in the English countryside. It was a place of mercurial cliques and mysterious rules where teachers were constantly reminding their charges of how special they were. Now, years later, Kathy is a young woman. Ruth and Tommy have reentered her life. And for the first time she is beginning to look back at their shared past and understand just what it is that makes them special–and how that gift will shape the rest of their time together.

The film version of Never Let Me Go came out in 2010 and stars Carey Mulligan, Andrew Garfield, and Sally Hawkins.

Winner of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist, this is a novel you'll fall in love with from page one. Marie-Laure lives with her father in Paris near the Museum of Natural History where he works as the master of its thousands of locks. When she is six, Marie-Laure goes blind and her father builds a perfect miniature of their neighborhood so she can memorize it by touch and navigate her way home. When she is twelve, the Nazis occupy Paris, and father and daughter flee to the walled citadel of Saint-Malo, where Marie-Laure's reclusive great uncle lives in a tall house by the sea. With them they carry what might be the museum's most valuable and dangerous jewel. In a mining town in Germany, the orphan Werner grows up with his younger sister, enchanted by a crude radio they find. Werner becomes an expert at building and fixing these crucial new instruments, a talent that wins him a place at a brutal academy for Hitler Youth, then a special assignment to track the Resistance. More and more aware of the human cost of his intelligence, Werner travels through the heart of the war and, finally, into Saint-Malo, where his story and Marie-Laure's converge. Deftly interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, Doerr illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another.

You can find the TV series All the Light We Cannot See on Netflix in November 2023.

Jhumpa Lahiri won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1999 for her riveting debut collection of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies. Her debut novel, The Namesake, spans three decades, two continents, two generations, and is equally engrossing. Ashoke Ganguli, a doctoral candidate at MIT, chooses Gogol as a pet name for his first-born son because a volume of the Russian writer's work literally saved his life, but, in one of many confusions endured by the immigrant Bengali couple, Gogol ends up on the boy's birth certificate. Unaware of the dramatic story behind his unusual and, eventually, much hated name, Gogol refuses to read his namesake's work. Just before he leaves for Yale, he goes to court to change his name to Nikhil. A winding path through divided loyalties, comic detours, and wrench love affairs, The Namesake brilliantly illuminates the immigrant experience and the tangled ties between generations.

Mira Nair directed the film version of The Namesake in 2006, which stars Kal Penn, Irrfan Khan, and Tabu.

The best-selling author of Room turns her narrative eye to 19th century Ireland, where Lib Wright, an English nurse trained by Florence Nightingale herself, is tasked with an unsettling mission: watching over Anna O'Donnell, an 11-year-old girl in a small Irish village who, so it's claimed, hasn't ingested any nourishment in four months. Tourists have been flocking to the O'Donnell's cabin, eager to see if Anna is a true miracle or a freakish medical anomaly. Lib, however believes this "extraordinary wonder" to be nothing more than a lucrative scam, and is determined to locate Anna's secret food source and expose her as a fake. Yet Lib is charmed by Anna, who is as whip-smart as she is pious, and becomes alarmed when the girl's surprisingly robust health begins to falter shortly after the nurses' watch begins. Written with all the propulsive tension that made Room a huge phenomenon, The Wonder works beautifully on many levels – a tale of two strangers who transform each other's lives, a powerful psychological thriller, and a story of love pitted against evil.

You can find the film version of The Wonder on Netflix, directed by Sebastián Lelio and starring Florence Pugh.

Tembi Locke's raw and heartfelt memoir is “a captivating story of love lost and found” (Kirkus Reviews) set in the lush Sicilian countryside, where one woman discovers the healing powers of food, family, and unexpected grace in her darkest hours. It was love at first sight when actress Tembi met professional chef, Saro, on a street in Florence. There was just one problem: Saro's traditional Sicilian family did not approve of his marrying a Black American woman. However, the couple, heartbroken but undeterred, forged on. Eventually, they reconciled with Saro's family just as he faced a formidable cancer that would consume all their dreams. From Scratch chronicles three summers Tembi spends in Sicily with her daughter, Zoela, as she begins to piece together a life without her husband in his tiny hometown hamlet of farmers. In the Sicilian countryside, she discovers the healing gifts of simple fresh food, the embrace of a close knit community, and timeless traditions and wisdom that light a path forward.

You can find the series From Scratch on Netflix, starring Zoe Saldaña and Danielle Deadwyler, and with Attica Locke as showrunner.

The first book in the acclaimed, New York Times best-selling Silo Trilogy, Wool is the story of mankind clawing for survival. The world outside has grown toxic, the view of it limited, talk of it forbidden. The remnants of humanity live underground in a single silo. But there are always those who hope, who dream. These are the dangerous people, the residents who infect others with their optimism. Their punishment is simple. They are given the very thing they want: They are allowed to go outside. After the previous sheriff leaves the silo in a terrifying ritual, Juliette, a mechanic from the down deep, is suddenly and inexplicably promoted to the head of law enforcement. With newfound power and with little regard for the customs she is supposed to abide, Juliette uncovers hints of a sinister conspiracy. Tugging this thread may uncover the truth... or it could kill every last human alive.

You can watch the TV series Silo on Apple TV+, starring Rebecca Ferguson, David Oyelowo, Tim Robbins, and Common.

It is November 25, 1960, and three beautiful sisters have been found near their wrecked Jeep at the bottom of a 150-foot cliff on the north coast of the Dominican Republic. The official state newspaper reports their deaths as accidental. It does not mention that a fourth sister lives. Nor does it explain that the sisters were among the leading opponents of General Rafael Leónidas Trujillo’s dictatorship. It doesn’t have to. Everybody knows of Las Mariposas–the Butterflies. In this extraordinary novel, the voices of all four sisters–Minerva, Patria, María Teresa, and the survivor, Dedé–speak across the decades to tell their own stories, from secret crushes to gunrunning, and to describe the everyday horrors of life under Trujillo’s rule. Through the art and magic of Julia Álvarez's imagination, the martyred Butterflies live again in this novel of courage and love, and the human costs of political oppression.

The film version of In the Time of the Butterflies, directed by Mariano Barroso, came out in 2001 and stars Salma Hayek, Edward James Olmos, Marc Anthony, and Demián Bichir.

Daisy is a girl coming of age in Los Angeles in the late 1960s, sneaking into clubs on the Sunset Strip and dreaming of singing at the Whisky a Go-Go. By the time she's twenty, her voice is getting noticed. Also getting noticed is the band The Six, led by the brooding Billy Dunne. On the eve of their first tour, his girlfriend Camila finds out she's pregnant, and with the pressure of impending fatherhood and fame, Billy goes a little wild on the road. Daisy and Billy cross paths when a producer realizes the key to supercharged success is to put the two together. What happens next will become the stuff of legend. The making of that legend is chronicled in this riveting and unforgettable novel, written as an oral history of one of the biggest bands of the seventies.

You can watch the TV series Daisy Jones and the Six starring Riley Keough, Sam Claflin, Camila Morrone, and Suki Waterhouse on Amazon Prime.