Showing results by publisher "-emdashery books-" in Coming of Age

Melody Browne can remember nothing before her ninth birthday. Now in her early 30s, Melody lives in the middle of London with her 17-year-old son. She hasn’t seen her parents since she left home at 15, but Melody doesn't mind. She’s better off on her own. And then fragments of her past start to come back. At first her memories mean nothing to her, but slowly, day by day, she begins to piece together the real story of her childhood. But with every mystery she solves, another one materialises; with every question she answers, another appears....

Winner of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction, 2008.
Balram Halwai is the White Tiger - the smartest boy in his village. Too poor to finish school, he has to work in a teashop until the day a rich man hires him as a chauffeur, and takes him to live in Delhi. The city is a revelation. Balram becomes aware of immense wealth all around him, and realizes the only way he can become part of it is by murdering his master. The White Tiger presents a raw and unromanticized India, both thrilling and shocking.

After Charlotte’s father died, her mother changed. She became cold and distant, and Charlotte slowly withdrew into herself. She spent years feeling lonely and insignificant, and rarely spoke more than a few words to anyone. One night, after a traumatic incident instigated by her mother, Charlotte is arrested and taken to juvie. A year later, Charlotte’s being released from juvie for the second time. Instead of an awful group home, her social worker brings a welcome surprise: Charlotte’s long-forgotten uncle, Arthur, who is all too eager to help her.

Jackal is proud to be a Grey Bastard, member of a sworn brotherhood of half-orcs. Unloved and unwanted in civilized society, the Bastards eke out a hard life in the desolate no-man's-land called the Lots, protecting frail and noble human civilization from invading bands of vicious full-blooded orcs. But as Jackal is soon to learn, his pride may be misplaced. Because a dark secret lies at the heart of the Bastards' existence - one that reveals a horrifying truth behind humanity's tenuous peace with the orcs, and exposes a grave danger on the horizon.

Lei Ling Wen is lonely. Bored of her demanding after-school schedule of tuition, study and violin lessons, she struggles to see eye to eye with her strict Chinese-Malaysian mother. When Lei Ling is befriended by elegant, worldly socialite Gigi Nu, she is enchanted by the realm of luxury and freedom that suddenly opens up to her. Gigi encourages Lei Ling to flout her routines and treats her to designer products and expensive meals, and soon Lei Ling finds herself caught between two lives, and increasingly at odds with her exasperated mother.

Blue Echohawk doesn't know who she is. She doesn't know her real name or when she was born. Abandoned at two and raised by a drifter, she didn't attend school until she was ten years old. At nineteen, when most kids her age are attending college or moving on with life, she is just a senior in high school. With no mother, no father, no faith, and no future, Blue Echohawk is a difficult student, to say the least.

Half a millennium ago, in a desperate attempt to defeat the Ithonian Empire, Kanderon Crux and her allies banished the city of Imperial Ithos from Anastis. Her dread weapon, the Exile Splinter, even erased the memory of its location from the universe. Now it's returning and bringing the Exile Splinter back with it. The great powers of the continent are desperately hunting for the lost city, knowledge lost even to Kanderon herself. None know what ancient Ithonian weapons and enchantments might still be found in the ruins, but the Exile Splinter alone would be a prize to justify war.

Skippy and Ruprecht are having a doughnut-eating race one evening when Skippy turns purple and falls off his chair . . .And so begins this epic, tragic, comic, brilliant novel set in and around Dublin’s Seabrook College for Boys.

Chiamaka is a Nigerian travel writer living in America. Alone in the midst of the pandemic, she recalls her past lovers and grapples with her choices and regrets. Zikora, her best friend, is a lawyer who has been successful at everything until she must turn to the person she thought she needed least. Omelogor, Chiamaka’s bold, outspoken cousin, is a financial powerhouse in Nigeria who begins to question how well she knows herself. And Kadiatou, Chiamaka’s housekeeper, is proudly raising her daughter in America – but faces an unthinkable hardship that threatens all she has worked to achieve.

Two decades before Zimbabwe would win independence and ended white minority rule, 13-year-old Tambudzai Sigauke embarks on her education. On her shoulders rest the economic hopes of her parents, siblings and extended family, and within her burns the desire for independence. A timeless coming-of-age tale and a powerful exploration of cultural imperialism, Nervous Conditions charts Tambu's journey to personhood in a nation that is also emerging.

Miscellaneous “Lanie” Stones is the necromancer that Doédenna, god of Death, has been praying for. True, she's always been more interested in books and pastries than in creating abominations and raising armies of the undead. But still—she lives to love and serve Saint Death. And damn it duodecifold, Saint Death needs her! Lanie has many talents—her powers of death magic are growing more complex and stranger every day—but first and foremost is her ability to lay the unrestful dead to their unending slumber.

Waldo is ravenous. Horny. Blunt. Naive. Wise. Impulsive. Lonely. Angry. Hurting. Endlessly wanting. And the thing she wants most of all? Mr. Korgy, her creative writing teacher. Mr. Korgy, with the wife and the kid and the mortgage and the bills, with the dead dreams and the atrophied looks and the growing paunch. She doesn't know why she wants him.

I'm anything but sweet, despite what people think, so when he tells me I'm too good for him and I'm better off without him, I don't listen. My life was simple before Grave stepped through that door, but who wants simple?

After losing her sister, Savanna Litchfield has been living half a life. When Savannah's therapist suggests joining a trip around the world for grieving teens she agrees to go clutching tightly to the unread journal her sister left behind. Seventeen-year-old Cael Woods is angry. One year after losing his older brother his life has spiraled. Once the most promising hockey player in the junior league, Cael can no longer step onto the ice. When his parents sign him up for a trip abroad no part of him wants to go. As Cael and Savannah embark on a journey they begin to find solace in each other.

Alan Hollinghurst, the Booker Prize-winning author of The Line of Beauty, brings us a dark, luminous and wickedly funny portrait of modern England through the lens of one man’s acutely observed and often unnerving experience. It is a story of race and class, theatre and sexuality, love and the cruel shock of violence, from one of the finest writers of our age.

Ever since the accident that changed Sophie’s life, she sees numbers everywhere. From the leaves on a tree to the volume of a puddle, everything has its number. And every person she meets? Their number is counting down the number of days they have left. Despite being lonely, Sophie has decided she’s not dating anyone with a number smaller than 20,000 days: 55 years together should be plenty. Which is fine, until Adam—her first love and most definitely the one that got away—suddenly reappears. And his number? Just 24 days…

Everybody thought Shiloh and Cary would end up together – everybody but Shiloh and Cary. Slow Dance follows these star-crossed best friends from their inseparable teen years on the wrong side of the tracks to their far-flung adulthoods – through her marriage and motherhood and his time in the Navy – as they try to work out what they’re actually supposed to be to each other.

Ten-year-old Abdullah would do anything for his younger sister. In a life of poverty and struggle, with no mother to care for them, Pari is the only person who brings Abdullah happiness. For her, he will trade his only pair of shoes to give her a feather for her treasured collection. When their father sets off with Pari across the desert to Kabul in search of work, Abdullah is determined not to be separated from her. Neither brother nor sister know what this fateful journey will bring them.

Have you ever stood next to a fire and felt the heat of it on your skin? Stared into the flames and thought how amazing it would be to be that free? It changes direction with the wind, destroying everything in its wake. That's what she felt like. Alexa was a wildfire that torched everything she touched, and I couldn't wait to be consumed by her.

The second born son in a broken marriage, Joey Lynch has spent a lifetime picking up the pieces of a family unraveling. When his older brother Darren skips town on his first day of secondary school, twelve-year-old Joey finds himself thrown into the role of protector to his younger siblings and mother. Plagued by self-loathing, and furious with the world, he grapples with teenage life, his unwavering sense of duty to his family, while balancing precariously close to a life of addiction that threatens to swallow him whole.