Voted 2009 Penguin Orange Readers' Group Book of the Year.
Now a major film.
Initially it is difficult to believe that the young son of the commandant of Auschwitz is as innocent as he is, then you begin to accept his ignorance and follow a developing friendship through to its dreadful conclusion. That this is written for children is easy to forget. I urge you to read Morris Gleitzman’s Once, too, for the Jewish perspective.
| Primary Genre | Modern and Contemporary Fiction |
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Nine-year-old Bruno knows nothing of the Final Solution or the Holocaust. He is oblivious to the appalling cruelties being inflicted on the people of Europe by his country. All he knows is that he has been moved from a comfortable home in Berlin to a house in a desolate area where there is nothing to do and no one to play with. Until he meets Shmuel, a boy who lives a strange parallel existence on the other side of the adjoining wire fence and who, like the other people there, wears a uniform of striped pyjamas.
Bruno’s friendship with Shmuel will take him from innocence to revelation. And in exploring what he is unwittingly a part of, he will inevitably become subsumed by the terrible process.
The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas features in the following genres: Modern and Contemporary Fiction, eBooks of the Month, Young Adult Fiction, General Fiction, Fiction, Recommendations, Children’s, Teenage and Educational
The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is available in Paperback, Hardback
The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas was written by John Boyne and published by Random House Children's Books
The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas has 215 pages
£8.09