Last week I asked if Memento Mori could be regarded as a cruel book.
The second book was Julie Myerson's Something Might Happen, a superb but cruel book about terrible things.
"Ghost Soldiers" is a cruel book in a sense, one that spares no details of the amazing savagery of Japanese behavior, but Mr. Sides also tries to account for that savagery and to show that it was not official Japanese policy and that it was mitigated by individual acts of compassion.
Nabokov thought it was the cruelest book ever.
Told from the first-person perspective of a colt named Beauty as he passed through a series of owners, some kindly, some cruel, the book was concerned with the welfare of animals in industrialized Victorian England, and it carried a sophisticated reformist agenda.
James Dawson, author of Cruel Summer, This Book Is Gay, and current Queen of Teen I've got to recommend two books Noughts and Crosses by Malorie Blackman, which made me want to write YA, and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime by Mark Haddon.
It would certainly be, in anybody's book, cruel and unusual to give somebody twenty lashes, to hang you for being a horse thief".
The use of torture was condoned at the highest levels as it was taking place, as Ian Cobain describes in his book Cruel Britannia.
For answers, I turned to Sanaz Alasti, an Iranian lawyer and professor of criminal justice at Texas's Lamar University, and author of the book "Cruel and Unusual Punishment: Comparative Perspective in International Conventions, the United States and Iran".
Cobain's book, Cruel Britannia, says the British military operated a "torture centre" throughout the 1940s "in complete secrecy, in a row of Victorian villas in one of the most exclusive neighbourhoods in London".
All rise for his majesty the queen as James Dawson, the author of Hollow Pike and Say Her Name, becomes the first male winner of the Queen of Teen award for his latest book, Cruel Summer.
