"The Rocking-Horse Winner" (1933), by D. H. Lawrence. In an effort to gain his mother's love, a young boy rides his rocking horse into delirium attempting to divine the winners of horse races.

Reef (1994) a novel by Romesh Gunesekera. An orphaned boy becomes a cook for a wealthy single man on the island of Sri Lanka and takes solace in the discipline of housework. The rising political unrest of the country coincides with the boy's coming of age, and he is ultimately forced to flee his native land for England.

"Flavours of Exile," another of Lessing's stories written In the 1950s, in which a young girl seeks to belong to her adopted African homeland while her mother longs for the familiarity of her English past.

"A Worn Path" by Eudora Welty (1941). An elderly African-American woman perseveres on a long trek into...