by Louis Sachar
Holes by Louis Sachar (published 1998) is a celebrated children's novel that won both the Newbery Medal and the National Book Award for Young People's Literature.
The story follows Stanley Yelnats, an unlucky boy from a family that believes it is cursed thanks to his "no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing-great-great-grandfather." After being wrongly convicted of stealing a pair of shoes, Stanley is sent to Camp Green Lake, a brutal juvenile detention camp in the Texas desert where there is no lake at all. Each day the boys are forced to dig a hole five feet deep and five feet wide, supposedly to build character. Stanley slowly realises the warden is making them dig because she is searching for something buried long ago. The novel weaves together three storylines across different time periods, a curse, a buried treasure and a long-dead outlaw named Kissin' Kate Barlow, which gradually connect into one satisfying whole.
