Showing titles in Coming of Age

In many ways, twelve-year-old Artem’s life in Chernihiv, Ukraine, is normal. He spends his days helping on his grandfather’s sunflower farm, drawing in his sketchbook—a treasured gift from his father, who works in America—and swimming in the river with his little brother, Yuri. In secret, Artem has begun wrestling with romantic feelings for his best friend, Viktor. In a country where love between two boys is unthinkable, Artem has begun to worry that growing up, his life will never be normal.

Meet Orlando: a young nobleman in Elizabethan England, poet, lover, adventurer—and, after a transformational sleep, a woman. Spanning over 300 years of British history, Orlando bends the rules of time, gender, and narrative as its protagonist navigates shifting societies, identities, and expectations, all while seeking something elusive: the truth of the self. Playful, profound, and radically ahead of its time, Virginia Woolf's groundbreaking novel is part love letter, part satire, and part meditation on the fluid nature of existence.

"There’s nothing there." The words may as well have been a death sentence to young Declan. Without mana, there could be no studying at the sky-piercing Pinnacle Towers, there could be no great monster hunts, and there could be no following in his father’s legendary footsteps. He’d be a cripple. But when a terrible accident forces him to flee, Declan learns the true nature of his mana. Just because it doesn’t resonate at any known frequency doesn’t mean it isn’t magic. Just because he can’t cast the same spells as everyone else doesn’t mean he isn’t a mage.

Inspired by Nigeria's folktales and war, Under the Udala Trees is a deeply searching, powerful debut about the dangers of living and loving openly. Ijeoma comes of age as her nation does; born before independence, she is 11 when civil war breaks out in the young republic of Nigeria. Sent away to safety, she meets another displaced child, and the star-crossed pair fall in love. They are from different ethnic communities. They are also both girls.

Cassandra Edwards is a graduate student at Berkeley: gay, brilliant, nerve-racked, miserable. At the beginning of this novel, she drives back to her family ranch in the foothills of the Sierras to attend the wedding of her identical twin, Judith, to a nice young doctor from Connecticut. Cassandra, however, is hell-bent on sabotaging the wedding.

A young royal from the far north, is sent south for a political marriage in an empire reminiscent of imperial China. Her brothers are dead, her armies and their war mammoths long defeated and caged behind their borders. Alone and sometimes reviled, she must choose her allies carefully. Rabbit, a handmaiden, sold by her parents to the palace for the lack of five baskets of dye, befriends the emperor's lonely new wife and gets more than she bargained for.

Jim, a handsome, all-American athlete, has always been shy around girls. But when he and his best friend, Bob, partake in “awful kid stuff,” the experience forms Jim’s ideal of spiritual completion. Defying his parents’ expectations, Jim strikes out on his own, hoping to find Bob and rekindle their amorous friendship.

Stuck in a dead-end job, broken-hearted, broke and estranged from her best friend, Violet's life is nothing like she thought it would be. She wants more - better friends, better sex, a better job - and she wants it now. So, when Lottie - who looks like the woman Violet wants to be when she grows up - offers Violet the chance to join her exciting start-up, she bites. Only it soon becomes clear that Lottie and her husband, Simon, are not only inviting Violet into their company, they are also inviting her into their lives.

All This Could be Different introduces us to Sneha. A recent college graduate freshly arrived in Milwaukee, she occupies her days with rote, stressful work as a young consultant for a battery production corporation. She is, as her boss reminds her, a 'contractor, no benefits'. Her nights are spent ordering furniture off the internet, trying out the newfangled invention of dating apps and avoiding confrontation with the terrifying property manager who lives below her. But the rewards are bountiful.

Nathan’s used to being alone. Drifting from town to town following his salesman father, he seeks solace in his studies when he can’t find understanding in his own home; his father is abusive and an alcoholic and his mother would rather disappear into the background than protect him. Enter Roy. The older boy next door might have a girlfriend at school and at church, but there’s no question that they’re drawn to one another, and the two quickly become entangled in a covert relationship.

Samson Kabarebe is on the verge of stardom. At just nineteen, he's poised to take the football world by storm. Joining a struggling Premier League team, he steps into the spotlight, taking over the position-and squad number-of a rising homegrown talent who is wrestling with his own dreams and desires.

An unnamed young trans woman grows up in a working class suburb that has no place for her. She discovers community and kinship in downtown Madrid, amid a lively party scene animated by junkies, pop divas, and fallen angels. But with each step she takes forward, she finds herself confronted by a violence she does not yet know how to counter; in this thrilling and yet often terrifying world each choice can truly be a matter of life and death.

Peter Mandel is an 18-year-old private school senior who’s passionate about photography and bent on keeping his attractions secret. Enter Adam Algedi, a charming, worldly guy who doesn't do labels, but does want to do Peter.

Ren Yu is a swimmer. Her daily life starts and ends with the pool. Her teammates are her only friends. Her coach, her guiding light. If she swims well enough, she will be scouted, get a scholarship, go to a good school. Her parents will love her. Her coach will be kind to her. She will have a good life. But these are human concerns. The concerns of those confined to land. Ren grew up on stories of creatures of the deep, of the oceans and the rivers. Stories that called sailors to their doom. Stories that dragged them down and drowned them.

Love, sex, death, family, friendship, betrayal, tenderness, brutality, sacrifice and revelation. This incendiary collection of stories from acclaimed writer Christos Tsiolkas, best-selling author of The Slap and Barracuda, takes you deep into worlds both strange and familiar, and introduces you to characters who will never let you go and situations that will haunt you forever.

Amar can’t wait to tell everyone his wonderful news: he’s found The One, and he’s getting married. But it turns out announcing his engagement on a group chat might not have been the best way to let his strict Muslim Bangladeshi family know that his happy-ever-after partner is a man—and a white man at that.

A bildungsroman set over three acts, Ponyboy is a quest for self-identity set among the art world of Paris and Berlin. In the first act, Ponyboy's eponymous narrator - a pill-popping, speed-snorting trans-masculine lightning bolt - unravels in his Paris apartment. Ponyboy is caught in a messy love triangle with Baby, a lesbian painter who can't see herself being with someone trans, and Toni, a childhood friend who can actually see Ponyboy for who he is. Strung out, Ponyboy follows Baby to Berlin in act two, where he sinks deeper into drugs and falls for a fellow writer.

Eighteen years old, pregnant and working as a pizza delivery girl, our dysfunctional heroine is deeply lost and in complete denial about it all. She’s grieving the death of her father, avoiding her loving boyfriend and flagrantly ignoring her future. Her world is further upended when she becomes obsessed with Jenny, a stay-at-home mother new to the neighbourhood, who comes to depend on weekly deliveries of pickle-covered pizzas for her son’s happiness.

Eighteen-year-old Aine Kamara has been anticipating a reunion with her older sister, Mbabazi, for months. But when Mbabazi shows up with an unexpected guest, Aine must confront an old fear: her beloved sister is gay in a country with tight anti-homosexuality laws. Over a weekend at Aine's all girls' boarding school, sisterly bonds strengthen, and a new friendship emerges between Aine and her sister's partner, Achen. Later, a sudden death in the family brings Achen to Mbabazi's and Aine's village, resulting in tensions that put Mrs. Kamara's Christian beliefs to the test.

Lorel has always dreamed of becoming a witch—learning magic, fighting monsters, and exploring the world beyond the small town where she and her mother run the stables. Even though a strange plague is killing the trees in the Kingdom of Cekon and witches are being blamed for it, Lorel wants nothing more than to join them. There’s only one problem: all witches are women, and she was born a boy. When the coven comes to claim her best friend, Lorel disguises herself in a dress and joins in her friend’s place, leaving home and her old self behind.