Showing results by publisher "Recorded Books" in Coming of Age

Ben has just returned from a war waged against a nameless enemy. To avoid being nabbed by police and forced to work in a factory, he’ll need to find a wife. But to do that, he must wear a bachelor’s suit—and the tailor won’t make one for him.

Richly complex, darkly comical, and irresistibly charming. Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist is one of the greatest novels of the 19th century, from one of literature's most esteemed craftsmen. Published serially between 1837 and 1839, it secured Dickens' reputation as a writer of exceptional skill and talent.

In 1970s Boston, the glossy veneer of 16-year-old Sarah Kunitz’s wealthy family is starting to show cracks. Her parents’ constant fighting and her mother’s prescription pill abuse drive Sarah into two romantic relationships with unforeseen consequences. With grief fresh in her heart, Sarah wonders if she or her family will ever love again.

Nine-year-old Susan has the whole glorious, carefree summer ahead of her. Sometimes she worries that her mother and father aren't happy together, but from her vantage point under the dogbushes, the world is safe and wonderful. Her life begins to change when her friends introduce her to the creepy new city kid, Eugene, who's come to spend the summer. Eugene holds a strange power over the group, a power that Susan feels most profoundly on the night she is forced to play "doctor".

Un largo y ameno recorrido por México, de norte a sur, de este a oeste, en el que la escritora quiere mostrar algo más. Ahonda en las profundidades del país mientras se interna en el complejo y laberíntico mundo femenino: la historia de dos hermanas y su estrecha relación a pesar de la distancia; una se muda a otro continente, la otra se queda en México a conseguir dinero para hacer realidad su proyecto de abrir una casa de huéspedes frente al mar.

Argentinian Mario Satz delivers a heartwarming story about a pediatrician who finds a new, deeper meaning to life. The doctor decides to throw himself off a mountain in depression. Right before he leaps, a tear falls into his right palm - it is a mystical sign from above. It takes the man on a fantastic journey - without him ever leaving the mountaintop.

With a missing father, sister, and grandfather - and a mother who refuses to explain - 11-year-old Clara lives with many questions. When she begins interviewing an elderly immigrant for a school biography assignmnent, she learns he too has a shadowy past. Attempting to fill in gaps, Clara invents version upon version of stories for both her new friend and herself. As the tales evolve, she uncovers some unsettling family history, but most importantly, she begins to discover what matters most in life. Filled with small surprises, Shadow Baby is at turns funny, poignant, and heartwarming.

From basement rec rooms to midnight railway tracks, Action Transfers to Smarties boxes crammed with joints, from Paul McCartney on the kitchen radio to their furious teenaged cover of the Ramones, Aubrey McKee and his familiars navigate late adolescence amid the old-moneyed decadence of Halifax.

Peyton Cabot's 15th year will be a painful and transformative one. His father, the heroic but reluctant head of a moneyed Savannah family, has come home from WWII a troubled vet, drowning his demons in bourbon and distancing himself from his son. A tragic accident shows Peyton the depths of his parents' devotion to each other but interrupts his own budding romance with the girl of his dreams, Lisa Wallace. Struggling to cope with a young life upended, Peyton makes a daring decision: He will retrace a journey his father took at 15, riding his bicycle all the way to Key West, Florida.

Best mates Karl and Abu are both 17 and live near King's Cross. It's 2011 and racial tensions are set to explode across London. Abu is infatuated with gorgeous classmate Nalini but dares not speak to her. Meanwhile, Karl is the target of the local "wannabe" thugs just for being different. When Karl finds out his father lives in Nigeria, he decides that Port Harcourt is the best place to escape the sound and fury of London, and connect with a Dad he's never known. Rejected on arrival, Karl befriends Nakale, an activist who wants to expose ecocide....

In South Africa, the controversial topic of botched traditional circumcisions has been very much in the news of late. A Man Who Is Not a Man recounts the personal trauma of a young Xhosa initiate after a rite-of-passage circumcision has gone wrong. With frankness and courage, author Thando Mgqolozana's powerful novel details the pain and lifelong shame that is experienced as a result of not just the physical trauma, but the social ostracism of being labeled "a failed man".

Every year on March 26, Verity Peterson visits Ogunquit Beach, where she puts a handwritten message into a bottle and launches it into the waves. It’s a ritual of remembrance for the daughter she hasn’t seen in 16 years - not since her baby’s father, Alan, took two-month-old Gemma and disappeared. Verity keeps searching and hoping, sustained by the thought that someday she might get to be a mother to her own child. And finally, one phone call may change everything...

It came as no surprise to anyone in Yorktide when glamorous Carol Ascher fled the little Maine town for NYC. While Carol found success as an interior designer, her younger sister, Bonnie, stayed behind, embracing marriage and motherhood. She even agreed to take in Carol's teenage daughter during a tumultuous patch. Now both their girls are grown and Bonnie, recently widowed, is anticipating the day she'll retire to Ferndean House, the 19th-century family home on the rocky Maine coast. But 45 years after leaving Yorktide, Carol suddenly announces that she's moving back - into Ferndean.

Five-year-old Clara Bynum is dead, drowned in the Potomac River in the shadow of a seemingly haunted rock outcropping known locally as the Three Sisters. River, Cross My Heart weighs the effect of Clara's absence on the people she has left behind: her parents; the friends and relatives of the Bynum family; and, most especially, Clara's sister, 10-year-old Johnnie Mae, who must come to terms with the powerful and confused emotions stirred by her sister's death as she struggles to decide what kind of woman she will become.

In this powerful, edgy, and funny debut novel about making right and wrong choices, Bump gives us an unforgettable and lovable protagonist, Claude McKay Love. Claude is a young black man in search of a place where he can fit; born on the South Side of Chicago, he is raised by his civil rights-era grandmother, who tries to shape him into a principled actor for change. After a riot consumes his neighborhood, Claude decides to escape Chicago for another place, to go to college, to find a new life and identity. But he discovers, there's no escaping the people and places that made him.

Two years after his partner, Francesco, died, 28-year-old Kevin Doyle is dusting off his one good suit jacket for yet another funeral, yet another loss in their close-knit group. They had all been young, beautiful, and living the best days of their lives, though they didn't know it. That was before New York City began to feel like a war zone, its horrors somehow invisible, and ignored by the rest of the world. Some people might insist that Francesco is in a better place now, but Kevin definitely isn't.

It’s the summer of 1982 and fourteen-year-old Swanna Swain is the only one left at camp. The place is a ghost town by the time her mother Val finally shows up six hours late—stoned and radiant—in a Ford pickup driven by Borislav, her new young Russian lover. Assuming she is headed home to her air-conditioned Upper West Side apartment, Swanna and her lovable younger brother Madding are instead dragged to Vermont—to an artist colony where kids are not welcome and they are forced to sleep in the back of the truck, while Val is cozy inside the house with the Russian.

Jenny is thirteen when an epic dust storm rolls into her central California town in December 1977. Bedridden after contracting a life-threatening illness in the storm and suffering a shocking loss, Jenny realizes she will never be cared for by the mother who both neglects and terrifies her or the father who allows it. She relies on her cousin, Heather, who has the loving home Jenny longs for; her beloved great-uncle, Gino, the last link between generations; her best friend, Henry, a free spirit with whom she shares an inexplicable bond; and baseball star, Billy, who becomes her first love.

Jillian (Jewels) Whitman lives with her mistakes and tries to move past the biggest one of her life—Dillon Bleu—rocker and once best friend. After saying goodbye to the lakeside trailer park of his youth, Dillon sets out to make something of himself only to discover all he needs is his Jewel. After hitting it big in the music industry, Dillon heads back to ask for a second chance. Only … nothing is ever as easy as it seems …

In the tradition of Studs Lonigan and A Stone for Danny Fisher, a transporting historical saga about three young men coming-of-age on New York City’s rapidly changing, vibrant, challenging, sometimes heartless Upper West Side as they walk a fine line between right and wrong amid the turbulence and scandals of the 1960s, '70s, and '80s.