Age 13+
Sherman Alexie, the novelist, poet, short-story writer and film-maker, was chosen as one of Granta's Best Young American novelists in 1996. He is a Spokane/Coeur d'Alene Indian (he scorns the term Native American), and grew up on a reservation. This award-winning book, drawing on his own teenage years, is an autobiographical fiction about being born hydrocephalic (ie with water on the brain) and then defying expectations by leaving the reservation to go to a privileged white school, and having to deal with the hostility of his own people.

The book is nearer the knuckle than its cover suggests - chronicling Arnold Spirit's life as a “chronic masturbator” in a community afflicted by violence and drink. Central to the story is the shifting relationship between Arnold and his best friend Rowdy, who likes to beat people up, and who becomes Arnold's worst enemy when he leaves; Arnold and Rowdy are pitted against each other when their schools play baseball. And yet even their enmity is always a kind of love. Written in a pacey vernacular, with sentence-long paragraphs and interspersed with Arnold's own cartoons, this book is funny and poignant, and makes us care about a community that has been tidied away out of sight, to the shame of the wider world.

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian by Sherman Alexie
Andersen Press £5.99

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