Showing results by publisher "Penguin Audio" in Coming of Age

It’s the tabloid sensation of the year: two well-known footballers standing in the dock, charged with sexual assault, a series of vile text messages pointing towards their guilt. As the trial unfolds, Evan Keogh reflects on the events that have led him to this moment. Since leaving his island home, his life has been a lie on many levels. He’s a talented footballer who wanted to be an artist. A gay man in a sport that rejects diversity. A defendant whose knowledge of what took place on that fateful night threatens more than just his freedom or career.

On the cusp of adulthood, James dreams of another life far away from his small village. His burgeoning desire – an ache for autonomy, tenderness and sex – threatens to unravel his shy exterior. Then he meets Luke. Unkempt and handsome, charismatic and impulsive, he has been sent to live with his aunt and uncle on a nearby farm. Luke comes with a reputation for danger, yet underneath his bravado lie anxieties and hopes of his own. As the seasons pass, and the pair form an ever-changing bond, James falls into a terrifying first love that will transform his life forever.

Written in a Yorkshire dialect that brings a place and its people magnificently to life, We Pretty Pieces of Flesh takes you by the hand and drags you through Doncaster’s schoolyards, alleyways and nightclubs, bringing back the intimate treachery of adolescence and how we betray ourselves when we don’t trust our friends. Like The Glorious Heresies and Shuggie Bain, it tracks hard-edged lives and makes them sing, turning one overlooked and forgotten place into the very centre of the world.

Thirteen-year-old Byron needs to get away and doesn't care how. Sick of being beaten up by lads for 'talkin' like a poof' after school. Sick of dad - the weightlifting, womanising Gaz - and Mam, who selfishly pissed off to Turkey. Sick of the people who shuffle about Hucknall like the living dead, going on about kitchens they're too skint to do up and marriages they're too scared to leave. It's a new millennium, Madonna's Music is top of the charts and there's a whole world to explore - and Byron's happy to beg, steal and skank onto a rollercoaster ride of hedonism.

When Obiefuna's father witnesses an intimate moment between his teenage son and the family's apprentice, newly arrived from the nearby village, he banishes Obiefuna to a Christian boarding school marked by strict hierarchy and routine, devastating violence. Utterly alienated from the people he loves, Obiefuna begins a journey of self-discovery and blossoming desire, while his mother Uzoamaka grapples to hold onto her favourite son, her truest friend.

Thora, August and Hugo come from different worlds—one an art school dreamer, one a wealthy scion of the old elite and one an ordinary boy from out of town. But over the course of two sky-blue summers in Stockholm, they are drawn together magnetically. The novel opens years later, when Hugo, long estranged from Thora and August, is visited by their daughter—who has questions about her parents that she believes Hugo can answer—and the memories of those luminous days come flooding back.

It is summer 1956 when 15-year-old Bridget first meets Isabella. In their conservative Connecticut town, Isabella is a breath of fresh air. She is worldly, alluring and brazen: an enigma. When they receive an offer to study at the Academy in Italy, Bridget is thrilled. This is her ticket to Europe and - better still - a chance to spend nine whole months with her glamorous and unpredictable best friend. There, lodged in a convent of nuns who have taken a vow of silence, the two girls move towards a passionate but fragile intimacy.

London, 2014. Hal Lancaster – twenty-two, gay, Catholic, chops lines of cocaine with his myWaitrose card – is the reluctant heir of his father Henry, the sixteenth Duke of Lancaster. Henry is half tyrant, half martyr, with an investment in his eldest son that has grown into an obsession. While Hal floats between internships and drinking sessions, Henry keeps him in check with passive-aggression, religious guilt, and a cruelty that Hal sometimes confuses for tenderness.

Savannah "Sav" Henry is almost the person she wants to be, or at least she's getting closer. It’s the second semester of her sophomore year. She’s finally come out as bisexual, is making friends with the other queers in her dorm, and has just about recovered from her disastrous first queer “situationship.” She is cautiously optimistic that her life is about to begin.

Our protagonist always believed herself to be the smartest person in the room. But a couple of years on from earning a fancy PhD, she’s still broke, single and stuck in a job going nowhere. One option remains: marry rich. Her summer becomes a whirlwind of dating: martinis with a lazy heir, board games with a butch producer and a Venmo request from a ‘socialist’ trust-fund babe. However, when some unexpected and tragic news takes her – and her project – to Tehran she is forced to ask and answer some overdue questions about family, connection and, terrifyingly, her own purpose.

Three young brothers leave Los Angeles in the dead of night for Iran, taken by their father from their mother to a country and an ancestral home they barely recognize. They return to the Valley months later, spit back into American life and changed in inexorable ways. Under the California sun, our protagonist, the youngest brother, begins to piece together a childhood shattered by his father's violence, a queer adolescence marked by a shy, secret love affair with a boy he meets on the basketball court, and his ever-changing status as a Muslim in America.

It’s the summer of ’96 and best friends (and secret girlfriends) Hannah and Sam are driving across the country from Long Beach, New York, to the fabled queer paradise of San Francisco, free from the harsh gazes of their neighbors and the stifling demands of Hannah’s devout Orthodox Jewish mother. In San Francisco, they will finally be together as a real couple, out in the open, around other queer people . . . even if the move means leaving behind Hannah’s beloved Bubbe.

Moving between Ireland, Scotland and London, Something About Her is a story about the fragility and transformative power of first love. With vivid insight and tenderness, it exposes the fear, hope, and longing that can consume us, particularly when there’s so much you still don’t know about love, about life, and about yourself.

Grad student Will Dillard has largely buried memories of the summer he spent at a camp intended to "cure" homosexuality. But when he finds out a horror movie based on the camp is hitting theaters, he's forced to face his past - and his role in another camper's death. As he recounts the events surrounding his "failed rehabilitation", Will strikes out on an impromptu road trip back home to Mississippi, eventually returning to the abandoned campgrounds to solve the mysteries of that pivotal summer.

Introvert Gina Mulley is determined to become a tattoo artist, and to find somewhere she belongs in her conventional Long Island town. But this is 1985, when tattooing is still a gritty, male-dominated fringe culture, and Gina’s whimsical style is far from the norm. Luck is on her side: Gina’s older brother Dominic owns a tattoo shop, and he reluctantly grants her one year to prove herself.

At age 16, Fahad hopes to spend the summer with his mother in London. His father, Rafik, has other plans: hauling his son to Abad, the family's feudal estate. Rafik wants to toughen up his sensitive boy, to teach him about power, duty, family—to make him a man. He enlists Ali, a local teenager, in this project, hoping his presence will prove instructive. Instead, over the course of one hot indolent season, attraction blooms between the two boys, and Fahad finds himself seduced by the wildness of the land and its inhabitants.

Francine's Spectacular Crash and Burn is a bighearted novel that will wiggle its way into the heart of every listener. It follows Francine Stevenson. whose life revolved around her anxious agoraphobic mother—her abrupt passing rocks Francine to her core and sends her into a tailspin of depression. She copes by rummaging through her mother’s assortment of pills, dancing manically at night to the disco she and her mother enjoyed while keeping up appearances at work during daylight hours.

Bright and precocious ten-year-old Kwame Akromah knows how to behave. He knows the importance of good manners, how to stay at the top of the class and out of the way when his mother and father are angry with each other. But when his charismatic cousin Yaw arrives from Ghana to live with the family while he looks for work, the rules Kwame has learned about the world can no longer guide him. Twenty years later, Kwame is a secondary-school teacher, popular with his students and depended on by his friends.