Item category 2: Black & Asian Interests

Pi lives in Pondicherry, India, where his father owns the city's zoo. The family decides to immigrate to Canada, but tragedy strikes at sea. In the lifeboat are five survivors: Pi, a hyena, a zebra, a female orang-utan and a 450-pound Royal Bengal tiger.

The final volume of Maya Angelou's autobiography begins in 1964 when the author returned to the USA during its great period of upheaval and social change. She reports on this tragic period in her own inimitable and insightful way.

Cameron is 13 years old and desperately in need of a heart transplant, when a pioneering doctor approaches his family with a startling proposal. He can give Cameron a new heart - not from a human, but from a pig!

Several high-profile murders in LA have the whole district panicking. All the victims are perfect visions of motherhood, and when detailed, first-person accounts of the killings arrive at the LA Times, FBI agent Alex Cross is called in to investigate.

Identical twins, Georgia and Bessi Hunter, live in the loft of 26 Waifer Avenue in Neasden. This novel watches the Hunter family as they make their way through the 1980s. Some family members having more success than others.

Alex Cross was happy to leave the FBI, but now he can't seem to keep away. When his former partner Sampson calls on him for help to solve a series of brutal rapes, Cross reveals some dark truths. Michael Sullivan, the deadly hitman from his past, has returned, and he has a chilling new plan.

This text tracks two brothers and a sister on their separate journeys through different times: one as a missionary to Liberia in the 1830s, one a pioneer on a wagon trail to the American West, and one a GI posted to a Yorkshire village in WWII.

Osebo the leopard has a fine drum, but he won't let anyone else have it, not even Nyame the Sky-god. So Nyame offers a big reward to the animal who will bring him the drum.

From the brilliant, sharp, witty pen of Sam Selvon, this is a classic award-winning novel of immigrant life in London in the 1950s.