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

Fourteen years after we first met Simons Manigault, our protagonist is newly graduated from Clemson University, bored, unfocused, and idling his summer away at his mother’s home in Edisto, South Carolina. Not yet ready to fully embrace adulthood, Simons finds himself surrendering to cynicism, as well as to the temptations of his "turned-out-well" first cousin, Patricia. To avoid sinking further into his rut, Simons embarks on a road trip through the South.

Returning home to New York from Europe on his twenty-first birthday, draft-dodging narrator Bunty Bronstein is frustrated with his increasingly pompous businessman father and his disaffected mother, who no longer shows the flame she once possessed. Equipped with an incisive view of bourgeois lifestyles in New York, Bunty observes the shifting sensibilities of his family members, and yet has difficulty apprehending his own place in the world.

Long listed for the 2010 Scotiabank Giller Prize, Lemon is the story of a teenaged girl with the numbers against her: Three mothers, one deadbeat dad, one cancer-riddled protégé, two friends, one tree-hugging stepbrother, and a 60 percent average. The adults in her life are all mired in self-centeredness and the other kids are busy getting high, and she just can't be bothered to fit in.

Who are the people you’ll never forget? For Mary Murphy, there are five, eulogized here in an utterly unforgettable voice. Mary tells the story of her own life - her childhood spent trading one home and father figure for another, her efforts to track down her rebellious sister, and her winding search for purpose - through her experiences and encounters with the people who shaped her path. The result is an unconventional and moving story about identity, family, and belonging.

Hairstyles of the Damned is an honest and affectionate depiction of wanting to belong, but never quite belonging. Joe Menos pitch-perfect prose illuminates the tumultuous realities of American adolescence, the disintegration of the modern family, and the way a mix-tape can change a persons life. Following the riotous exploits of Brian, a Catholic school malcontent, and his best friend Gretchen, a punk rock girl fond of brawling, this work pursues what it means to develop your own identity.

Perfectly evoking the sights and sounds of the summer of 1978 in Brooklyn, Suzanne Corso makes an acclaimed fiction debut with this powerful coming-of-age tale, told from an adult perspective, of family, best friends, first loves, and big dreams waiting to come true. Samantha Bonti is fifteen years old, half Jewish and half Italian, and hesitantly edging toward pure Brooklyn.

"I wonder today how no one else could see the bad thing coming. Not that I knew back then what the bad thing was; and if I had - if I'd known one of us was going to die - would there have been anything I could have done to prevent it? I play it all back in my mind, over and over. The clues were all there." On New Year's Eve, eleven-year-old Ruth and her brother and sister sit at a bedroom window, watching the garden of their new Dublin home being covered in a thick blanket of snow.

Lucinda is a nice, middle-class girl fresh out of university, determined to 'repay her debt to society'. But when she signs up as a volunteer 'mentoring' ex-cons, it is not long before she is seduced by the darker side of life.

A novel about Catholic girls poised - hilariously- on the brink of going all the way, Virgins recalls in aching detail what it was like to be an 18-year-old Catholic high school senior...in the '50s. This book contains the rules and regimen, hijinks and longing of that time.

This is not a hair book. It's a dark comedy of a spiritual misfit, a child with a dream born into the wrong town. Religious cults, corporate cults, and insane clients - Francis can't catch a break. Francis has observed his own inability to fit in since birth, and his decision to be a professional cosmetologist only exacerbates his innate oddness.

Written in an urban vernacular that’s electrifying and intimate, On the Come Up introduces a heroine whose voice is irrepressible, dynamic, and unstintingly honest. Thirteen-year-old AnnMarie Walker dreams of a world beyond Far Rockaway, where the sway of the neighborhood keeps her tied to old ideas about success. While attending a school for pregnant teens, AnnMarie comes across a flyer advertising movie auditions in Manhattan. Astonishingly, improbably, and four months before she’s due to give birth - she lands a lead role.

Dr Malcolm Goldblatt has one last chance in the NHS. As the temporary senior registrar of a London hospital, he needs to prove to the medical establishment he can toe the corporate line. But this new hospital is all rather depressingly familiar - from Dr Madic's ferocious aversion to work, Dr Burton's knife-in-the-back ambition, right up to the pathologically insecure yet monstrously vain Professor Small, it is an environment of short tempers, back-biting and office politics - a place in which caring for patients seems secondary to caring for professional reputations.

Despite being a straight-A student and voracious reader, eight-year old Sandrine Miller is treated as little more than a servant by her mother, who forces Sandrine to clean house, do chores and take care of her younger half-sister, Yolanda. On top of the despair of her life at home, Sandrine must confront growing up against the harshness of life in 1970s-era New Orleans, where men in cars follow her home from school and she is ostracized because she is a light-skinned black girl.

The seventh game of the World Series is about to be played, and more than the world championship is at stake. A man’s destiny is on the line. Johnny Longboat, one of baseball’s greatest pitchers, is taking the mound for the New York Mohawks in what may be his final game. With millions of eyes upon him, only he is aware of the conflicts tormenting him. At 41, Johnny is a man trying to make sense of his past while fearing what the future could bring when his playing career ends.

Growing up in the 1970s has never before been portrayed with such delightful ludicrousness and heartrending tenderness as in Why Aren't You Smiling? When teenage Leonard decides to quit being a Dweeb and instead join the Burnouts, his "good kid" persona is abandoned as he embarks on a comically painful journey of self-discovery through his unconventional friendship with Rick, an older Jesus freak barefoot hippie. The farcical parallel story of how Irving Mandelbaum from Los Angeles transmogrifies into rag-tag cult leader Rick of The Forever Family paints an indelible portrait of California during one of its most preposterous eras.

Meet Hickey, an American school teacher in his late 30s, an American school teacher who burns his bridges with the school board and goes to Africa as an aid worker. Working for an agency in Nairobi, one of his jobs is to drive food and medical supplies to Southern Sudan to an aid station run by Ruth, a middle-aged woman, who acts as nurse, doctor, hospice worker, feeder of starving children, and witness. Ruth is gruff but efficient, and Hickey, who is usually drawn to youth and beauty, is struck by her devotion. Returning to Nairobi, he can’t forget what he has seen.

Two best friends from high school, Peggy Morrison and Constance Masters, reunite in Washington and continue their indecent behavior. One becomes a Capitol Hill gossip columnist and the other is a prize-winning journalist, and both exploit their feminine wiles to get what they want.

One of New York’s finest saves brilliant and debonair (but drug-addicted) Daniel Topler from his suicide attempt on the George Washington Bridge. In court, the judge entrusts the young man to the care of Dr. Jacob Bernstein, an elderly psychiatrist at an upscale rehab clinic. The doctor issues these commands: Obey the no-drugs rules and join the geriatric temple men’s group he leads - or face incarceration. Dan has no choice but to comply. Dan’s prep school friends initially lure him back to the drugs, booze, and women. But all that changes when he meets Bernstein’s daughter, Laura....

Nothing can mend a broken heart quite like family. Sherry has struggled all her life to understand who she is, where she comes from, and, most important, why her mother slapped her cheek one summer afternoon. The incident has haunted Sherry, and it causes her to dig into her family's past. Like many family histories, it is fractured and stubbornly reluctant to reveal its secrets. But Sherry is determined to know the full story. In a few days' time, her extended family will gather for a reunion, and Sherry sets off across the country with her mother, Dumpling, to join them.

From the start of Elizabeth McKenzie’s beguiling fiction debut, we are drawn into the offbeat worldview of sharp-eyed, intrepid Ann Ransom. Stop That Girl chronicles Ann’s colorful coming-of-age travails, from her childhood in a disjointed family through her tender adolescence and beyond. Along the way, she discovers the absurdities that lurk around every corner of a young woman’s life, by way of oafish neighbors, overzealous boyfriends, prurient vegetable salesmen, sour landlords, and an iconoclast grandmother, known even to her family as Dr. Frost.