Showing results by publisher "Audible studios" in Coming of Age

The underground mine fires ravaging Pennsylvania coal country have forced 11-year-old Brigid Howley and her family to seek refuge with her estranged grandparents, the formidable Gram and the black lung-stricken Gramp. Tragedy is no stranger to the Howleys, a proud Irish-American clan who takes strange pleasure in the "curse" laid upon them generations earlier by a priest who ran afoul of the Molly Maguires. The weight of this legacy rests heavily on a new generation, when Brigid, already struggling to keep her family together, makes a grisly discovery in a long-abandoned bootleg mine shaft.

Brian Stoppard is blessed with prodigious natural talents. Howard Cohen, less so. Starting in middle school in New York, Howard watches Brian effortlessly win at everything he tries: He’s a natural chess champion, a perfect athlete, a brilliant student. As the two move through life as friends and competitors, Brian’s easy success is a constant source of envy, awe, and inspiration for the ambitious but less-gifted Howard.

Paris Adieu is a coming-of-age tale of life lessons, romance, and self-empowerment all wrapped in the sights, sounds, and smells of Paris. The first time Ava Fodor visits Paris as a 19-year old au pair, she has no idea who she is. Paris introduces Ava to the type of woman she'd like to become. Her French boyfriend introduces her to the concept of being comfortable in her own skin. She's intrigued. If only she knew how...

Just after World War II, a young orphan living in Naples comes under the protection of Don Gaetano, the superintendent of an apartment building. He is a generous man and is very attached to the boy, telling him about the war and the liberation of the city by the Neapolitans. He teaches him to play cards, shows him how to do odd jobs for the tenants, and even initiates him into the world of sex by sending him one evening to a widow who lives in the building. But Don Gaetano possesses another gift as well: he knows how to read people’s thoughts.

Fourteen-year-old Audrey Martin, with her Poindexter glasses and her head humming the 3/4 meter of gospel music, knows she'll never get out of Kentucky - but when her fingers touch the piano keys, the whole church trembles. Her best friend, Caroline, daydreams about Hollywood stardom, but both girls feel destined to languish in a slow-moving stopover town in Montgomery County. That is, until chance intervenes and a booking agent offers Audrey a ticket to join the booming jazz scene in Harlem.

High school wrestler Jake Persson is living on vitamins and diet Mountain Dew as he fights to make weight at the height of championship season. In the small mining town in northern Minnesota's Iron Range where Jake lives, this is the most exciting thing that has happened in years. During his last meet, Jake confronts his future and the unnerving sense that his own body and desires are starting to betray him. Chelsey Johnson writes a gripping story about hunger, control, and wrestling down desire.

West of New Orleans among a few small Gulf islands lies the Isle aux Chiens, a tiny, impoverished strip of land burdened by intolerable heat and roaming packs of wild dogs. Here a handful of Creole families eke out a meager existence by fishing the Gulf waters. Such is the fate of Al Landry and his seventeen-year-old daughter, Annie. All Annie has ever known is the wild sea, but she longs for other people and places, including the glamor of life in the Big Easy.

A confused and conflicted but not altogether angry young man shares his observations, disappointments, rants, and sexual desires in a revealing series of letters to an unnamed friend. Our hero wants to be a writer, but is stuck doing mind-numbing work for an unscrupulous encyclopedia publisher. He muddles through two engagements, one to a bright-eyed Catholic virgin, the other to a woman pregnant with another man’s child.

The profound coming-of-age story of a young boy growing up in rural Virginia, and the historic summer that would change his life forever. During the summer of 1959, Virginia’s Prince Edward County is entirely consumed by passionate resistance against, and in other corners, support for, the desegregation of schools as mandated by Brown v. Board of Education. Benjamin Rome, the 10-year-old son of a chicken farmer in one of the county’s small townships, struggles to comprehend the furor that surrounds him, even as he understands the immorality of racial prejudice.

Being a teenage literary prodigy is hard. Richard Goodman may have a book contract at 17, but his parents don’t respect his opinions, he can’t lose his virginity, and his ego inflates and deflates with every breath. Even when Richard receives the attention he craves, he finds that fame and fortune can’t deliver him from his own flaws. The Work Is Innocent is Yglesias’s fictional take on his own freakishly precocious literary coming-out as a teen.

Rafael Yglesias completed this novel, his first, at the age of sixteen. The largely autobiographical story follows a New York prep school dropout yearning for freedom and authenticity. On its release the book was hailed as a next-generation Catcher in the Rye. But protagonist Raul Sabas comes of age in a very different New York than Holden Caulfield - a tumultuous and radicalized city following the student takeover of Columbia University and assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Once upon a time, the Caliph of Baghdad sent the Emperor Charlemagne a wonderful gift: An elephant named Abul Abbas. That gift brought great magic into the royal court, and a great betrayal. With the help of a stableboy who is more than he seems, and the Elephant himself, the Emperor’s daughter Rowan must learn to master that magic and save her father’s life.

In Almost Tall, 14-year-old Dinah finds herself plucked from her provincial midwestern ballet class and dropped in her uncle’s glittering New York penthouse. What starts out as a lonely summer quickly becomes a whirl of cocktails and haute couture under the mercurial attention of her uncle’s bombastic and insecure partner, Eddie. With remarkable poise, she struggles against a city that seems determined to turn innocence into cynicism and the young into “strangers to youth.”

When Ahmed's parents send him to a residential treatment center known as Serenity Ridge, it's with one goal: to "fix" their son, at any cost. But eleven months of abuse and overmedication leave him desperate to escape. And when the opportunity comes, Ahmed runs away to San Francisco. There, he moves into a secret safe house shared by a group of teens. Until they become independent at eighteen, the housemates hide away from authorities, bound by rules that both protect and frustrate.

It's the start of one of the hottest summers on record with weeks without rain; the summer of Abba, T-Rex and David Bowie; of the Notting Hill riots and when Big Ben stopped dead. Luke Wolff is about to turn 18 and is set to enjoy his last summer at home on the Isle of Wight before leaving for college. His job at a holiday camp promises new friendships and romance. But with the heat and open windows, secrets become harder to hide and his parents' seemingly ordered lives become unstuck and the community is gripped by scandal.

From the suburban disorder of 1980s southern England, 13-year-old Jake watches his world unravel as his father and older brother leave the family home and his mother increasingly finds solace in drink. Even as Jake outwardly shrugs off doubts about his paternity, the question hangs over him like an invisible spectre.

A poignant tale of humans and robots and the meaning of life.

Esme Singer is a resilient girl from Los Angeles, new to Manhattan, who takes better care of her beautiful, alcoholic mother than her mother does of her. A former fashion model and extra in the movies, her mother attracts a series of husbands and boyfriends as Esme watches in fascination and sometimes horror. Esme's father comes and goes, forever riding the wave of the latest get-rich-quick scheme.

Alice Fivey is seven years old when her father dies, and ten when her mentally fragile mother is institutionalized. So begins the “sleepover life” for Alice. Shuttled among the homes of wealthy relatives, retainers, babysitters, and reluctant caretakers, Alice must learn their habits and adapt if she is to survive. But how is she to remain intact after the loss of her parents, whose troubled pasts are invoked to punish and manipulate her? Books help, as do kindly teachers.

In Pequot Landing, there are two sights to see: The largest elm in America, which dominates the stately old village green, and the house of Lady Harleigh. When the Great War ended, she was the most beautiful bride in the village, and though she was widowed soon after, mourning dampened neither her beauty nor her spirits. By the time the Great Depression rolls around, she is the unchallenged center of Pequot society - lovely and energetic, but subject to bouts of grim melancholy that hint at something dark beneath her surface.