Title Recommendations based on Jenny Mellor
Awe and exhilaration—along with heartbreak and mordant wit—abound in this account of the aging Humbert Humbert's obsessive, devouring, and doomed passion for the nymphet Dolores Haze. Lolita is also the story of a hypercivilized European colliding with the cheerful barbarism of postwar America, but most of all, it is a meditation on love—love as outrage and hallucination, madness and transformation.
War and Peace broadly focuses on Napoleon's invasion of Russia in 1812 and follows three of the most well-known characters in literature: Pierre Bezukhov, the illegitimate son of a count who is fighting for his inheritance and yearning for spiritual fulfillment; Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, who leaves his family behind to fight in the war against Napoleon; and Natasha Rostov, the beautiful young daughter of a nobleman who intrigues both men. As Napoleon's army invades, Tolstoy brilliantly follows characters from diverse backgrounds—peasants and nobility, civilians and soldiers—as they struggle with the problems unique to their era, their history, and their culture.
Sam, an 18-year-old on the autism spectrum, takes a funny, yet painful, journey of self-discovery for love and independence and upends his family.
Portal 2 pits the protagonist of the original game, Chell, and her new robot friend, Wheatley, against more puzzles conceived by GLaDOS, an A.I. with the sole purpose of testing the Portal Gun's mechanics and taking revenge on Chell for the events of Portal. As a result of several interactions and revelations, Chell once again pushes to escape Aperture Science Labs.
Detroit: Become Human is an neo-noir thriller. The plot revolves around three androids: Kara, who escapes the factory she was made in to explore her newfound sentience; Connor, whose job it is to hunt down deviant androids like Kara; and Markus, who devotes himself to releasing the androids from servitude. The characters may survive or perish depending on the choices that are made, which serve to shape the story as customised by the player.
Set in 1982 in the suburb of Blackeberg, Stockholm, twelve-year-old Oskar is a lonely outsider, bullied at school by his classmates. At home, Oskar dreams of revenge against a trio of bullies. He befriends his twelve-year-old, next-door neighbor Eli, who only appears at night in the snow-covered playground outside their building.
Rebel leaders map their strategy for an all-out attack on the Emperor's newer, bigger Death Star. Han Solo remains frozen in the cavernous desert fortress of Jabba the Hutt, the most loathsome outlaw in the universe, who is also keeping Princess Leia as a slave. Now a master of the Force, Luke Skywalker rescues his friends, but he cannot become a true Jedi Knight until he wages his own crucial battle against Darth Vader, who has sworn to win Luke over to the dark side of the Force.
Three wealthy children's parents are killed in a fire. When they are sent to a distant relative, they find out that he is plotting to kill them and seize their fortune.
A vampire relates his epic life story of love, betrayal, loneliness, and dark hunger to an over-curious reporter.
Seven babies were all born as part of a mysterious occurrence wherein 43 women around the world gave birth, despite none of them being pregnant. Adopted by eccentric billionaire Sir Reginald Hargreeves, they were raised to be part of a superhero fighting team known as "The Umbrella Academy." Now grown up, one sibling warns that the apocalypse is going to occur in eight days.
Everybody loves Mother Paula's pancakes. Everybody, that is, except the colony of cute but endangered owls that live on the building site of the new restaurant. Can the awkward new kid and his feral friend prank the pancake people out of town? Or is the owls' fate cemented in pancake batter?
Fresh Off the Boat is a genre-bending venture into subculture through the lens of food. Raw, wild, and heartfelt, Eddie Huang gets down in the underbellies of cities around the world in search of what's cooking in their back alleys and underground spots. He's hunting rabbits with biker gangs in Oakland, eating seafood and surfing in Taiwan, hitting low-rider BBQs in East LA, and dining on rice and beans with your drug dealer's grandmother in Miami.
Hallie Parker and Annie James are identical twins separated at a young age because of their parents' divorce. Unknowingly to their parents, the girls are sent to the same summer camp—where they meet and discover the truth about themselves and plot to switch places. Hallie meets her mother, and Annie meets her father for the first time in years.
Emma is a busy doctor who sets up a seemingly perfect arrangement when she offers her best friend Adam a relationship with one rule: No strings attached. But when a fling becomes a thing, can sex friends stay best friends?
In the not so distant future, Theodore, a lonely writer purchases a newly developed operating system designed to meet the user's every needs. To Theordore's surprise, a romantic relationship develops between him and his operating system. This unconventional love story blends science fiction and romance in a sweet tale that explores the nature of love and the ways that technology isolates and connects us all.
