Book picks similar to
Billy Elliot by Lee Hall


fiction
plays
coming-of-age
children

An Inspector Calls


J.B. Priestley - 1945
    An inspector calls to interrogate the family, and during the course of his questioning, all members of the group are implicated lightly or deeply in the girl's undoing. The family, closely knit and friendly at the beginning of the evening, is shown up as selfish, self-centered or cowardly, its good humor turning to acid, and good fellowship to dislike, before the evening is over. The surprising revelation, however, is in the inspector...

Master Harold...and the boys


Athol Fugard - 1982
    A white teen who has grown up in the affectionate company of the two black waiters who work in his mother's tea room in Port Elizabeth learns that his viciously racist alcoholic father is on his way home from the hospital. An ensuing rage unwittingly triggers his inevitable passage into the culture of hatred fostered by apartheid."One of those depth charge plays [that] has lasting relevance [and] can triumphantly survive any test of time...The story is simple, but the resonance that Fugard brings to it lets it reach beyond the narrative, to touch so many nerves connected to betrayal and guilt. An exhilarating play...It is a triumph of playmaking, and unforgettable."-New York Post"Fugard creates a blistering fusion of the personal and the political."-The New York Times"This revival brings out [the play's] considerable strengths."-New York Daily News

The Kite Runner


Khaled Hosseini - 2003
    It is about the power of reading, the price of betrayal, and the possibility of redemption; and an exploration of the power of fathers over sons—their love, their sacrifices, their lies.A sweeping story of family, love, and friendship told against the devastating backdrop of the history of Afghanistan over the last thirty years, The Kite Runner is an unusual and powerful novel that has become a beloved, one-of-a-kind classic.--khaledhosseini.com

Spring Awakening


Steven Sater - 2007
    Inspired by Frank Wedekind’s controversial 1891 play about teenage sexuality and society’s efforts to control it, the piece seamlessly merges past and present, underscoring the timelessness of adolescent angst and the universality of human passion.Steven Sater’s plays include the long-running Carbondale Dreams, Perfect for You, Doll (Rosenthal Prize/Cincinnati Playhouse), Umbrage (Steppenwolf New Play Prize), and a reconceived version of Shakespeare’s Tempest, which played in London.Duncan Sheik is a singer/songwriter who also collaborated with Sater on the musical The Nightingale. He has composed original music for The Gold Rooms of Nero and for The Public Theater’s Twelfth Night in Central Park.

Look Back in Anger


John Osborne - 1957
    He browbeats his flatmate, terrorizes his wife, and is not above sleeping with her best friend-who loathes Jimmy almost as much as he loathes himself. Yet this working-class Hamlet, the original Angry Young Man, is one of the most mesmerizing characters ever to burst onto a stage, a malevolently vital, volcanically articulate internal exile in the dreary, dreaming Siberia of postwar England.First produced in 1956, Look Back in Anger launched a revolution in the English theater. Savagely, sadly, and always impolitely, it compels readers and audiences to acknowledge the hidden currents of rottenness and rage in what used to be called "the good life."

Where the Red Fern Grows


Wilson Rawls - 1961
    Old Dan had the brawn. Little Ann had the brains, and Billy had the will to make them into the finest hunting team in the valley. Glory and victory were coming to them, but sadness waited too. Where the Red Fern Grows is an exciting tale of love and adventure you'll never forget.

The Red Pony


John Steinbeck - 1933
    He is thrilled when his father gives him a red pony, and later promises him the colt of a bay mare. Both these gifts bring joy to Jodi's life - but tragedy soon follows. As Jodi begins to learn the harsh lessons of life and death, he starts to understand what growing-up and becoming an adult really means.

Kes (Heinemann Plays)


Allan Stronach - 1993
    Many have large casts and an equal mix of boy and girl parts. In this dramatization of Barry Hines's novel, 15-year-old Billy trains a kestrel for whom he learns to feel great affection.

True West


Sam Shepard - 1981
    Sons of a desert dwelling alcoholic and a suburban wanderer clash over a film script. Austin, the achiever, is working on a script he has sold to producer Sal Kimmer when Lee, a demented petty thief, drops in. He pitches his own idea for a movie to Kimmer, who then wants Austin to junk his bleak, modern love story and write Lee's trashy Western tale.

Chicken Soup with Barley


Arnold Wesker - 1984
    It vividly captures the loss of political idealism and links the journey of a single family to the wider political situation.The kettle boils in 1936 as the fascists are marching. Tea is brewed in 1946, with disillusion in the air at the end of the war. Twenty years on, in 1956, as rumors spread of Hungarian revolution, the cup is empty.Sarah Khan, an East End Jewish mother, is a feisty political fighter and a staunch communist. Battling against the State and her shirking husband she desperately tries to keep her family together.This landmark state-of-the-nation play is a panoramic drama portraying the age-old battle between realism and idealism. Chicken Soup captures the collapse of an ideology alongside the disintegration of a family.Chicken Soup with Barley, the first in a trilogy that includes Roots and I'm Talking about Jerusalem was first performed at the Belgrade Theatre, Coventry in 1958 and transferred to the Royal Court in the same year.

Arcadia


Tom Stoppard - 1993
    Focusing on the mysteries--romantic, scientific, literary--that engage the minds and hearts of characters whose passions and lives intersect across scientific planes and centuries, it is "Stoppard's richest, most ravishing comedy to date, a play of wit, intellect, language, brio and... emotion. It's like a dream of levitation: you're instantaneously aloft, soaring, banking, doing loop-the-loops and then, when you think you're about to plummet to earth, swooping to a gentle touchdown of not easily described sweetness and sorrow... Exhilarating" (Vincent Canby, The New York Times).

Six Degrees of Separation


John Guare - 1990
    The tragicomedy of race, class, manners and naivete of liberalism.

Hamlet: Screenplay, Introduction And Film Diary


Kenneth Branagh - 1996
    "Its a ghost story, a thriller, an action-packed murder mystery, and a great tragedy that is profoundly moving." With an outstanding cast of international actors--including Derek Jacobi as Claudius, Julie Christie as Gertrude, Kate Winslet as Ophelia, Charlton Heston as the Player King, Robin Williams as Osric, and Gerard Depardieu as Reynaldo--Branagh's version, in which he will play the title role as well as direct, is sure to go down in film history.This beautiful volume includes Branagh's introduction and screenplay adaptation of Shakespeare's text, color and black-and-white stills, and a production diary that takes us behind the scenes for a day-to-day look at the shooting of his film.

Call Me By Your Name


André Aciman - 2007
    Unprepared for the consequences of their attraction, at first each feigns indifference. But during the restless summer weeks that follow, unrelenting buried currents of obsession and fear, fascination and desire, intensify their passion as they test the charged ground between them. What grows from the depths of their spirits is a romance of scarcely six weeks' duration and an experience that marks them for a lifetime. For what the two discover on the Riviera and during a sultry evening in Rome is the one thing both already fear they may never truly find again: total intimacy. The psychological maneuvers that accompany attraction have seldom been more shrewdly captured than in André Aciman's frank, unsentimental, heartrending elegy to human passion. Call Me by Your Name is clear-eyed, bare-knuckled, and ultimately unforgettable.

The Wolves


Sarah DeLappe