The First Time I Thought I Was Dying

When the Tree Sings

"Extraordinary . . . A modern classic."—Los Angeles Times "Remarkable . . . A highly original and eloquent story."—Boston Globe "The effect is haunting . . . bitter and beautiful."—New York Times Set in an impoverished Greece at the cruel time of the German occupation during WWII, When the Tree Sings is a boy’s eye view of war’s terrible ways. The young narrator’s parents are dead, his paternal home destroyed; he lives with his aged grandmother. With barely enough to survive on, they struggle to avoid death—and we, the readers, are given the life of the village, filled with its vivid characters: Flisvos, the narrator’s one-eyed playmate; Lekas the Informer; Uncle Iasson, who is in love with Lekas’s red-haired mistress; Dando, who dies of fright; a mysterious figure known as the puppeteer. Mundane horrors mix with terrible cruelty and occasional, hysterical, levity. Our starving narrator is offered a chestnut from the soldiers’ fire—if he can hold it hot from the coals in his bare hand; a motorcycle engine runs to disguise the sounds of prisoners being tortured; an explosion kills all the fish in the bay and they wash up soaked in kerosene and inedible; the boys spend an afternoon plotting how to hang Grandmother’s only drawers from the enemy flagpole; a kitten named November is trained to fly in a basket tied to a paper kite. The wonder of this novel is how engaging the world is to the boy and, so, to readers who accompany him through the pages of this “modern classic.” (Los Angeles Times).

The Presbyterian Magazine

50 Masterpieces you have to read before you die vol: 2 (2024 Edition)

This book contains the following works arranged alphabetically by authors last names - Little Women [Louisa May Alcott] - Sense and Sensibility [Jane Austen] - Peter Pan (Peter and Wendy) [J.M. Barrie] - Cabin Fever [ B. M. Bower] - The Secret Garden [Frances Hodgson Burnett] - A Little Princess [Frances Hodgson Burnett] - Alice's Adventures in Wonderland [Lewis Carroll] - The King in Yellow [Robert William Chambers] - The Man Who Knew Too Much [Gilbert Keith Chesterton] - The Woman in White [Wilkie Collins] - On the Origin of Species, 6th Edition [Charles Darwin] - Robinson Crusoe [Daniel Defoe] - The Iron Woman [Margaret Deland] - David Copperfield [Charles Dickens] - Oliver Twist [Charles Dickens] - A Tale of Two Cities [Charles Dickens] - The Double [Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky] - The Hound of the Baskervilles [Arthur Conan Doyle] - The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes [Arthur Conan Doyle] - The Three Musketeers [Alexandre Dumas] - The Curious Case of Benjamin Button [Francis Scott Fitzgerald] - A Room with a View [E. M. Forster] - Dream Psychology [Sigmund Freud] - Tess of the d'Urbervilles [Thomas Hardy] - Siddhartha [Hermann Hesse] - Dubliners [James Joyce] - The Arabian Nights [Andrew Lang] - The Sea Wolf [Jack London] - The Call of Cthulhu [Howard Phillips Lovecraft] - Anne of Green Gables [Lucy Maud Montgomery] - Beyond Good and Evil [Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche] - The Murders in the Rue Morgue [Edgar Allan Poe] - The Black Cat [Edgar Allan Poe] - The Raven [Edgar Allan Poe] - The Fall of the House of Usher [Edgar Allan Poe] - Swann's Way [Marcel Proust] - Romeo and Juliet [William Shakespeare] - Treasure Island [Robert Louis Stevenson] - The Elements of Style [William Strunk Jr.] - The Adventures of Tom Sawyer [Mark Twain] - The Prince and the Pauper [Mark Twain] - The Kama Sutra [Vatsyayana] - A Journey into the Center of the Earth [Jules Verne] - The Mysterious Island [Jules Verne] - 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea [Jules Verne] - The War of the Worlds [H. G. Wells] - The Time Machine [H. G. Wells] - The Star [H.G Wells] - The Canterville Ghost by Oscar Wilde - The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf