Do the A-Z author challenge

The Diary of a Young Girl

The Diary of a Young Girl is a book based on the excerpts from a diary written by Anne Frank while she was in hiding for two years with her family during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. The family was apprehended in 1944 and Anne Frank ultimately died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. After the war, the diary was retrieved by Anne’s father, Otto Frank.

The autobiography of Malcom X

Written by Alex Haley between 1964 and 1965, as told to him through conversations with Malcolm conducted shortly before Malcolm X’s death.

The book describes Malcolm X’s upbringing in Michigan, his maturation to adulthood in Boston and New York, his time in prison, his conversion to Islam, his ministry, his travels to Africa and to Mecca, and his subsequent career and eventual assassination at the Audubon Ballroom near 166th Street and Broadway in New York City. The book contains a substantial amount of thought concerning African-American existence.
Haley stated in the documentary Eyes on the Prize that it was difficult to write the autobiography because Malcolm X was quite averse to talking about himself and preferred instead to talk about the Nation of Islam.

There are exaggerations and inaccuracies in the book, some of which were acknowledged by Haley. For example, Malcolm X describes an incident in which he pointed a revolver with a single bullet to his head in front of his criminal cohorts and repeatedly pulled the trigger in order to show them he was not afraid to die. In the epilogue, Haley writes that when Malcolm was proof-reading the manuscript he told Haley that he had palmed the bullet and staged the act in order to scare the others into obedience.

In 2005 historian Manning Marable, talking about his forthcoming book Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, claimed that Haley worked with the FBI while writing the book with Malcolm X. He also talked about the existence of three unpublished chapters of the book.

The Song of Laughing Bird

In an isolated canyon, three children sit around a campfire as their grandfather tells the story of their ancestors in pre Ice Age Siberia. The tale begins 25,000 years ago with the winter birth of a girl-child, Laughing Bird. She is born into a world where survival is a constant struggle, and where traditions of the clan are upheld without question. But as Laughing Bird grows into a woman, she discovers that her destiny stretches far beyond the confines of the harsh tundra. Against the backdrop of this epic landscape, admidst the rich culture of the Red Bison Clan, an unusual love story unfolds. Finally, the time comes when Laughing Bird must choose whether to conform to the ways of the tribe, or to embark on an extraordinary adventure that could change the course of history.

The Blank Canvas: Inviting the Muse

The Blank Canvas offers solid advice for everyone who struggles with artist’s block or other problems of creative expression, including: drawing subject matter from unexpected sources, mining one’s daily visual responses for images, overcoming self-doubt and criticism, making choices when torn between several ideas, and getting started on assignments.

Happyslapped by a Jellyfish

Happyslapped by a Jellyfish is the second book by Karl Pilkington. It is a document of the many holidays Karl has gone on, both with his longtime girlfriend Suzanne and as a child. It also features more of Karl’s poetry. It was released in October 2007.

A Hopeless Romantic

Laura Foster was a hopeless romantic. It was her greatest character flaw, for it was the one thing that genuinely got her into trouble…

Her friends know it, her parents know it – even Laura acknowledges she lives either with her head in the clouds or buried in a romantic novel. But what’s wrong with seeing the world through rose-tinted glasses, even if it’s not delivered her a real-life dashing hero yet?

But when Laura’s latest relationship ends in disaster rather than a glorious sunset, she swears off men, and particularly hopeless romantic fantasies, for good. With her life in tatters around her, she foolishly agrees to go on holiday with her parents and grandmother (combined age nearly 200…).

After a few days of traipsing round Norfolk craft shops and National Trust properties, Laura’s ready to tear her hair out. And then she meets prickly but sexy Nick, estate manager at Chartley Hall, one of the country’s greatest stately homes. She swiftly finds she shares more than just a sense of humour with him – in fact, she starts to think she could fall for him.

But is Nick all he seems? Or has Laura got it wrong again? Will he be the one who makes her enter the convent permanently or is he The One who could thaw her frozen heart?

A Spot of Bother

George Hall doesn’t understand the modern obsession with talking about everything. ‘The secret of contentment, George felt, lay in ignoring many things completely.’ Some things in life, however, cannot be ignored. At fifty-seven, George is settling down to a comfortable retirement, building a shed in his garden, reading historical novels, listening to a bit of light jazz. Then Katie, his tempestuous daughter, announces that she is getting remarried, to Ray. Her family is not pleased – as her brother Jamie observes, Ray has ‘strangler’s hands’. Katie can’t decide if she loves Ray, or loves the wonderful way he has with her son Jacob, and her mother Jean is a bit put out by all the planning and arguing the wedding has occasioned, which get in the way of her quite fulfilling late-life affair with one of her husband’s former colleagues. And the tidy and pleasant life Jamie has created crumbles when he fails to invite his lover, Tony, to the dreaded nuptials. Unnoticed in the uproar, George discovers a sinister lesion on his hip, and quietly begins to lose his mind.

Lords of the Bow

The year is 1206 AD. For untold centuries the tribes of the steppes have been persecuted, divided and culled when they became too unruly for the liking of their Chin masters.

But now one man, still shy of his 30th birthday, has achieved the seemingly impossible and united the warring tribes at the point of an arrow. For the first time in history the Mongols stand together to avenge thousands of years of punishment from the Chin.

Their leader, born Temujin of the Wolves, now goes by the name of Genghis. One day, he and his sons will carve out the largest contiguous empire the world has ever seen, greater than the conquests of Attila and Alexander combined.

For now though, he stands on the borders of the northern Xi Xia kingdom with 45,000 mounted warriors and their families behind him.

Lords of the Bow, the second of the anticipated Conqueror trilogy from Conn Iggulden is a fictionalised account of Genghis Khan’s first forays into Chin lands; the first steps towards immortality.

Bart Simpson’s Guide to Life

Take a bite out of this bitsy but beefy package, brimming with morsels of wit, wisdom and worldly knowledge brought to you by the one and only Bartholomew J. Simpson. Get the hard-knocks facts of life from the guy who’s seen it all, heard it all, done it all and denies it all.

Scared to Live

It was an ordinary house fire with tragic consequences: a wife and two children dead. But then for DS Diane Fry and DC Ben Cooper the ordinary always means trouble.

Trouble like a bereaved family living in fear. Trouble like the shocking assassination of an elderly woman living alone in a quiet Peak District village. What could be the motive for inflicting such violence on harmless victims?

To find the answer, Fry and Cooper must direct their search far beyond Derbyshire to the other side of Europe, in a land where the customs are even more unfathomable than the language. With a little help from Europol, they discover some of the reasons why people can be scared to live – and the connection at the heart of the enquiry that proves to be the most surprising revelation of all.