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

My name is Ally Prince, and I've always been unlucky in love. I don't know why, I just always...have. When all of my best friends were falling for their soul mates in college, I was left behind. I was Ally, the pretty cousin of superstar quarterback Romeo Prince. I was Ally, the best friend to the most amazing group of girls I've ever known - a title I loved, but one I became tired of just being. And I was Ally, the one on which they could all rely. But to me, I was Ally, the girl with the heart no one had claimed....

The second instalment of J. M. Coetzee's fictionalized 'memoir' explores a young man's struggle to experience life to its full intensity and transform it into art. The narrator of Youthhas long been plotting an escape - from the stifling love of his overbearing mother, a father whose failures haunt him, and what he is sure is an impending revolution in his native country of South Africa. Arriving at last in London in the 1960s, however, he finds neither poetry nor romance and instead begins a dark pilgrimage into adulthood.

When Maria turns 20, she falls in love. She is in the wrong town, and he is the wrong sort of man. Going through his things, she finds a photo of herself when she was 12 years old. She has the same smile, but she is wearing the wrong clothes. Anne Enright's astonishing novel moves between Dublin, New York and London, following the lives of the real Maria and the girl in the picture. Stepping through the mirror to tell the story of the two women, both haunted by their missing selves, What Are You Like? Is an exquisitely written disquisition on families and identity.

When Wren Irving's numbers come up in the first ever national lottery draw, she doesn't tell her husband, Rob. Instead she quietly packs her bags, kisses her six-month-old daughter, Phoebe, good-bye, and leaves. Two decades later Rob has moved on and found happiness with their oldest friend, Laura. Phoebe, now a young woman, has never known any other life. But when Rob receives a mysterious letter, the past comes back to haunt them all.

Torn between two men; one was what I needed, the other was what I wanted. One man was safe and the other was dangerous. But both men would lay down their lives to save me. ATF agent Sam Cortez is fighting to bring down the Estrada family empire, which was built on murder and corruption. Alex Estrada did what was needed to keep me safe...and paid with his life. Starting over as I try to rebuild my life, it’s clear that the past is never what it seems. What no one knew was that we were all bound by lies.

Within these walls, he became my solace, my sanctuary, and my strength. I am not strong. I am just a survivor of circumstance. Isn't that what we all do? Survive? Each of us has our own set of circumstances to muddle through. Mine are just more.... complicated.

My name is Lily Gilmore, and I was supposed to be getting married today. That was until I found my fiancé having sex with my sister in the church moments before I was supposed to walk down the aisle. I grew up with a father who was a womanizer and cheated on my mother every moment he had the chance. He would even stoop as low as to take me and my sister with him on his trysts when we were younger. Cheating was all I grew up with, and I vowed never to live the life my mother did.

Ana Robbins was an Olympic star in the making—until tragedy forced her to leave that world behind. At the age of sixteen, she gave up her dream and never looked back. Fourteen years later, she’s a successful defense attorney, revered for her work with minors. But when her former coach turns up dead, Ana lands right back where it all began, and abruptly ended: The Palace, a world-renowned skating facility nestled high in the mountains of Colorado.

After four years of living with relatives in Switzerland, 17-year-old Joel Scherzenlieb finds himself in the United States for the summer, working at a Boy Scout camp. There, he meets 19-year-old Corey Cobbett, a fellow counselor and the only person Joel wants to be friends with. Soon, Joel's sarcastic, distant CIA father shows up and whisks him away to live with his mother, grandmother, and older sister on a farm in Virginia - he's not going back to Switzerland after all.

Stephanie Lang and Christine Avery meet in ballet school. Although they share the same dream - to become great dancers - they could not be more different. Ballet is in Stephanie’s blood; her mother, Anna, is a former dancer who lives to see her daughter achieve the fame she herself never attained. Christine has lived a sheltered life, secure in the love of her family. But her privileged upbringing conceals a devastating secret.

Two years after walking out of Jack’s wedding, Lexi has finally put her past behind her. She has made up her mind about where her life is headed. This time, she is sticking to her guns, no matter what. That is, until a phone call shatters the fragile grasp she has on her new life. Lexi is forced to question everything she thought she knew about what she wanted, and life - changing events push her to reevaluate the very plans she holds so dear. Nevertheless, Lexi has to choose her true path. That might just mean deciding, once and for all, that she doesn’t have to answer to anyone but herself.

This wasn't supposed to happen. But it did. This wasn't supposed to be my life. But it was. I was just a typical girl, living a typical life. Nothing was out of the ordinary until tragedy threw me into a turnstile I couldn't see my way out of. That was, until him. I never could've imagined my heart falling the way it did. Hard, fast, and with unbounding beauty. The only problem? He was off limits. Forbidden. But he became my everything, and I became his, so we risked it all.

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.

When Libby Gentry's parents receive the letter that she's failed out of school, Libby is forced to pack her Prada bag and head to work for her great-aunt in rural Louisiana. Nothing about tiny Elsbury, Louisiana, entices her until she locks eyes with the Southern charmer Blaine Crabtree. Libby is used to getting what she wants, and Blaine is no exception; but as the two grow closer, bigger problems arise. When new opportunities in Chicago pop up, she is presented with a difficult situation: wait for her redneck Romeo or move on.

Ottila McGregor is 30 years old and has decided it’s time to sort her life out. She's going to quit drinking, stop cheating, and finally find true happiness. Easy, right? Of course not. For a start, there's Grace, her best friend, who believes self-improvement is for people in their forties. Next there's Mina, her sister, who is mentally ill, and it might even be Ottila's fault. And then there’s Thales, the Greek guy who works in the hospital cafeteria. He's probably the best, most dangerous person Ottila's ever met.

Inside his home in Derry, Joe Logan's life is ruled by his tormented father; outside, by the tension and violence of the Troubles. Sometimes his father makes him run errands despite the nearby reports of gunfire. Other times his mother, afraid to be alone with her volatile and war-wounded husband, confines Joe to the home. A bright and sensitive young man, Joe finds solace and freedom in writing - a pursuit encouraged by Kathleen Doherty, a young teacher at a nearby school whom he meets and befriends.

It’s 1979, and Aviva Rossner and Seung Jung are notorious at Auburn Academy. They’re an unlikely pair at an elite East Coast boarding school (she’s Jewish; he’s Korean American) and hardly shy when it comes to their sexuality. Aviva is a formerly bookish girl looking for liberation from an unhappy childhood; Seung is an enthusiastic dabbler in drugs and a covert rebel against his demanding immigrant parents. In the minds of their titillated classmates - particularly that of Bruce Bennett-Jones - the couple lives in a realm of pure, indulgent pleasure. But, as is often the case, their fabled relationship is more complicated than it seems....

So begins this extraordinary first novel about one wild year in the life of 14-year-old Charlotte Flax, when she and her sister Kate move with Mrs. Flax into a sleepy 1960's Massachusetts town. Mrs. Flax is a woman who wears polka-dot dresses and serves hors d'oeuvres for dinner every night, and Kate is a child who basically wants to be a fish. And then there's Charlotte, who in Patty Dann's hands, is transformed into a young woman of infinite whim and variety.

Following the accidental drowning of her sister, 16-year-old Nif and her family move to a small village on the Welsh borders to escape their grief. But rural seclusion doesn't bring any relief. As her family unravels, Nif begins to put together her own form of witchcraft, collecting talismans from the sun-starved land. That is, until she meets Mally, a teen boy who takes a keen interest in her and has his own secret rites to divulge.

"As nearly perfect as any American fiction I know," is how Reynolds Price ( The New York Times) described this classic that has been a favorite of readers, both here and in Europe, for almost forty years. Set in provincial France in the 1960s, it is the intensely carnal story - part shocking reality, part feverish dream - of a love affair between a footloose Yale dropout and a young French girl. There is the seen and the unseen - and pages that burn with a rare intensity.