91Èȱ¬

The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole by Sue Townsend 
The Slaves of Solitude by Patrick Hamilton
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
A Child's Christmas in Wales by Dylan Thomas 
To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding
Capital by John Lanchester
Sour Sweet by Timothy Mo
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
American Psycho by Brett Easton Ellis
Narnia Chronicles by CS Lewis
Emma  by Jane Austen
Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel
Starter for Ten by David Nichols

The enormous room on the ground floor faced towards the north.  Cold for all the summer beyond the panes, for all the tropical heat of the room itself, a harsh thin light glared through the windows, hungrily seeking some draped lay figure, some pallid shape of academic goose-flesh, but finding only the glass and nickel and bleakly shining porcelain of a laboratory.  Wintriness responded to wintriness.  The overalls of the workers were white, their hands gloved with a pale corpse-coloured rubber.  The light was frozen, dead, a ghost.  Only from the yellow barrels of the microscopes did it borrow a certain rich and living substance, lying along the polished tubes like butter, streak after luscious streak in long recession down the work tables.

‘And this,’ said the Director opening the door, ‘is the Fertilizing Room.’