How can books help us understand the countries, cultures, and experiences that shape our school community?
Embedded Files
Books invite us to explore different perspectives, reflect on our own assumptions, and recognise our shared humanity. Discover stories by authors from countries where members of our school community have lived. As you read, consider how these texts deepen your understanding of others, encourage respect for differences, and inspire you to contribute to a more peaceful world.
Mrs. Fenia RIZOPOULOU,
IB DP Coordinator
Before Serbia, I lived in:
China
France
Greece
Norway
Greece
How do reputation and personal identity influence the pursuit of knowledge?
Mathematical Fiction 13+
eBook
Uncle Petros and Goldbach’s Conjecture (2000) by Apostolos Doxiadis follows a young man determined to uncover the truth about his reclusive uncle. Petros is dismissed by his family as a failure, but he was once a brilliant mathematician who devoted his life to proving Goldbach’s Conjecture—the deceptively simple claim that every even number greater than two can be expressed as the sum of two prime numbers. As his nephew investigates Petros’s past, he discovers a story of extraordinary ambition, intellectual obsession and devastating disappointment. Blending fiction with the history of mathematics, the novel features celebrated figures such as Hardy, Ramanujan, Gödel and Turing. It explores genius, perseverance, failure, family expectations and the sacrifices people make in pursuit of an impossible dream.
Apostolos Doxiadis is a Greek writer, playwright and filmmaker whose work brings mathematics and storytelling together. After studying mathematics at Columbia University and in Paris, he turned to the arts. His international bestseller Uncle Petros and Goldbach’s Conjecture helped establish mathematical fiction as a recognised genre. He is also the co-author of the acclaimed graphic novel Logicomix.
France
Can we reconstruct the past without imposing narratives?
Historical Fiction 16+
eBook
HHhH (2012) by Laurent Binet recounts Operation Anthropoid, the daring mission to assassinate Reinhard Heydrich, one of the most powerful and ruthless figures in Nazi Germany. In 1942, Czechoslovak resistance fighters Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš are parachuted into occupied territory and sent to Prague to carry out an almost impossible task. As their paths draw closer to Heydrich’s, the novel explores courage, resistance, sacrifice and the devastating consequences of challenging tyranny. Binet also steps into the narrative, questioning how a writer can faithfully reconstruct the lives of real people without distorting history. Blending meticulous research, suspense and metafiction, HHhH is both a gripping account of wartime resistance and a compelling reflection on truth, memory and the responsibilities of historical storytelling.
Laurent Binet is a French novelist and former teacher whose writing combines history, politics and playful experimentation with literary form. His debut novel, HHhH, became an international bestseller and won the Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman in 2010. His other works include The 7th Function of Language, Civilisations and Perspectives. Binet is recognised for transforming major historical events and figures into inventive narratives that question how history is remembered, interpreted and rewritten.
Norway
How reliable is memory in shaping what we believe about our own past?
Literary/Historical Fiction 15+
eBook
Out Stealing Horses (2005) by Per Petterson follows sixty-seven-year-old Trond Sander, who withdraws to a remote cabin in eastern Norway after the death of his wife. A chance encounter with a neighbour unexpectedly returns him to the summer of 1948, when he was fifteen and staying in the countryside with his father. What began as a season of freedom—riding horses, cutting timber and exploring the forest—became marked by tragedy, painful discoveries and his father’s sudden disappearance. As memories of the summer mingle with revelations about his father’s work with the Norwegian resistance during the Second World War, Trond must reconsider the past he thought he understood. Told in spare, lyrical prose, the novel explores memory, grief, family secrets, abandonment and the lasting influence of childhood experiences.
Per Petterson is an award-winning Norwegian novelist born in Oslo. Before becoming a full-time writer, he worked as a bookseller, translator, literary critic and librarian. His novels are known for their understated prose and powerful explorations of memory, family, grief and solitude. Out Stealing Horses became an international bestseller and won both the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the International Dublin Literary Award. His other acclaimed works include In the Wake, To Siberia and I Curse the River of Time.
China
Who gets to tell the story of the past?
Memoir/History 16+
eBook
Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China (1991) by Jung Chang tells the extraordinary true story of three generations of women living through a century of upheaval in China. Chang recounts the life of her grandmother, whose feet were bound and who became a warlord’s concubine; her mother, a committed Communist who endured persecution and imprisonment; and her own childhood under Mao. From the Japanese occupation and the Communist Revolution to the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, intimate family experiences reveal the human consequences of political extremism. Combining personal testimony with sweeping history, the memoir explores courage, loyalty, oppression, survival and the strength of family bonds. It is a powerful account of women whose lives were transformed by forces beyond their control, yet who struggled to preserve their dignity and humanity.
Jung Chang is a Chinese-born British writer whose work explores the personal impact of modern Chinese history. Raised in Sichuan during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, she moved to Britain in 1978 and later became an internationally bestselling author. Wild Swans has been translated into dozens of languages and has sold millions of copies worldwide. Chang is also the author of Empress Dowager Cixi and Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister, and co-author of Mao: The Unknown Story. Her books remain unavailable through official publication in mainland China.
Serbia
Can imagination help us understand reality?
Memoir/History 16+
eBook
Garden, Ashes (1975) by Danilo Kiš is a haunting, semi-autobiographical novel narrated by Andi Scham, a sensitive boy growing up in Yugoslavia and Hungary during the Second World War. At the centre of his memories is his father, Eduard: an eccentric railway inspector, failed writer and dreamer whose increasingly erratic behaviour both fascinates and embarrasses his son. As antisemitic persecution closes in on the family, Andi’s imagination transforms fear, poverty and displacement into moments of strange beauty. His father’s eventual disappearance into the Holocaust is approached indirectly, through fragmented memories and a child’s refusal to accept the full meaning of loss. Blending lyrical prose, dark humour and shifting perspectives, the novel explores childhood, identity, family mythology, memory and the ways imagination helps people endure unbearable realities.
Danilo Kiš was a major Yugoslav novelist, essayist and translator born in Subotica in 1935. His childhood during the Second World War—and the loss of his Jewish father, who was deported to Auschwitz—deeply shaped his writing. Kiš studied comparative literature at the University of Belgrade and later lived and worked in France. His acclaimed books include Early Sorrows, Hourglass, A Tomb for Boris Davidovich and The Encyclopedia of the Dead. Celebrated for combining autobiography, history and fiction, he became one of the most influential European writers of the twentieth century.
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