Showing titles in Coming of Age

It's 1965 and Joe Cluny is living in a working-class suburb with his mom, Marion, and sister, Ruby, spending his days trying to avoid trouble with the nuns at the local Catholic primary school. One evening his Aunty Oona appears on the doorstep, distressed and needing somewhere to stay. As his mom and aunty work out what to do, Joe comes to understand the secrets that the women in his family carry, including on their bodies. Yet their pleas for assistance are met with silence and complicity from all sides. Who will help Joe's family at their time of need?

Thirteen-year-old Mary Agnes Coyne, forced from her home in rural Ireland in 1886 after being accused of incest, endures a treacherous voyage across the Atlantic alone to an unknown life in America. From the tenements of New York to the rough alleys of Chicago, Mary Agnes suffers the bitter taste of prejudice for the crime of being poor and Irish.

Today is Ruth's first day of third grade at Dalton. The prestigious institution on New York's Upper East Side couldn't be more different from her old school in Harlem. Despite being the smartest girl in her grade, Ruth suspects that her classmates and teachers only see her dark skin. She also notices that Christina, the daughter of her mother's employer, treats Ruth very differently when they're hanging out with the popular girls rather than playing together.

It’s summer and a young man walks through the gates of a luxurious mansion in the south of France. At the dinner table, the Blakes are waiting for him: Annie, the family matriarch and world-famous singer, her inscrutable husband David and their children, Dot, aloof and rebellious, Lily, the man’s carefree university friend, and their enigmatic older brother Felix. Between sun-drenched days spent lounging by the pool and nights blurring into endless, opulent parties far from the reality of life in London, a restless attraction grows between Felix and the man.

Artemisia Gentileschi dreams of becoming a great artist. Motherless, she grows up among a family of painters - men and boys. She knows she is more talented than her brothers, but she cannot choose her own future. She wants to experience the world, but she belongs to her father and will belong to a husband. As Artemisia patiently goes from lesson to lesson, perfecting her craft, she also paints in private, recreating the women who inspire her, away from her father's eyes. Until a mysterious tutor enters her life.

Rune Kristiansen and Poppy Litchfield met as children and swore to be friends forever. As teenagers, their friendship grew into a love that promised to last a lifetime. But their worlds were shattered when Rune was sent home to his native Norway. Two years later, Rune is back, and Poppy is ready for their happy ever after to begin. But the boy who returns is not the Rune she remembers. What happened to turn her sweet, thoughtful Rune into this brooding stranger? And will the secret Poppy is carrying bring them closer together or separate them forever?

Ansel Bray, an artist known around the world for his tragic hiatus from the canvas. Ansel Bray, a broody, handsome man not known by me, at all. Long dark hair, blue eyes, and dimpled cheeks. I've never met her, but her image is imprinted in my mind. An angel muse who inspires me to paint again.

After her parents moved her and her brother to America, Preeti Desai never meant to tear her family apart. All she did was fall in love with a white Christian carnivore instead of a conventional Indian boy. Years later, with her parents not speaking to her and her controversial relationship in tatters, all Preeti has left is her career at a prestigious Los Angeles law firm. But when Preeti receives word of a terrible accident in the city where she was born, she returns to India, where she’ll have to face her estranged parents...and the complicated past they left behind.

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.

Alice Montgomery goes missing in 2015. Seven years later, her best friend Hannah is bouncing from job to job, city to city, forever feeling the need to outrun something, but unsure what. With the niggling need to move nipping at her heels, Hannah decides to return home–a small coastal town in Western Australia–for the first time since she left, to help her mum after surgery and confront their fractured relationship.

Young Eilis Lacey dreams of life beyond the confines of her tiny Irish village, but unlike her beautiful sister, Rose, Eilis' gifts are of a more practical nature: she has a head for numbers, and is a loving and dutiful daughter. Yet her ambition cannot be hidden and soon is noted by the Parish Priest, Father Flood. Via a church contact, he arranges for Eilis to travel to America where a job opportunity has arisen in New York with a reputable 'merchant of Italian origin'.

When his grandfather dies, a boy named Jay travels south with his family to the property he left them, a once flourishing farm that has fallen into disrepair. The trees are diseased, the fields parched from months of drought. Still, Jay’s father, Jack, sends him out to work the land, or whatever land is left. Over the course of these hot, dense days, Jay finds himself drawn to Chuan, the local son of the farm’s manager, different from him in every way except for one.

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.

It is September 1995. Selin, a Turkish-American college freshman from New Jersey, is about to embark on her first year at Harvard University, where she is determined to decipher the mysteries of language and to become a writer. In between studying psycho­linguistics and the philosophy of language, teaching ESL to a Costa Rican plumber, and befriending her classmate Svetlana (a Serbian refugee from Connecticut), Selin falls in love with a Hungarian maths student in her Russian class.

Sometimes friends hold you together. Sometimes they’re why you’re falling apart. Maggie, Harley and Róise are friends on the brink: of triumph, catastrophe, or maybe just finally growing up. Their crumbling Belfast houseshare has been witness to their roaring twenties, filled with questionable one-night stands and ruthless hangovers. But now fault-lines are beginning to show. The three girls are still grieving the tragic death of their friend, Lydia, whose room remains untouched. Their last big fight hangs heavy over their heads, unspoken since the accident.

‘Just let him go.’ Those are words Ky Tran will forever regret. The words she spoke when her parents called to ask if they should let her younger brother Denny out to celebrate his high school graduation. That night in 1996, Denny—optimistic, guileless, brilliant Denny—is brutally murdered inside a busy restaurant in Cabramatta, a Sydney suburb facing violent crime, an indifferent police force, and the worst heroin epidemic in Australian history.

Nicholas has plenty of reasons to feel unstable: he’s fifteen, the child of divorced parents, living with his absent dad in the bleak Chicago suburbs, and an outsider at school. Then, one day in geometry class, he forgets how to breathe. The doctor says it’s just panic, but Nicholas suspects that his real problem might not be a psychiatric one: maybe the Greek god Pan is trapped inside his body.

It is June 1962. In a hotel on the Dorset coast, overlooking Chesil Beach, Edward and Florence, just married that morning, are sitting down to dinner in their room. Neither is entirely able to suppress anxieties about the wedding night to come. On Chesil Beach is another masterwork from Ian McEwan - a story about how the entire course of a life can be changed by a gesture not made or a word not spoken.

I’ve won over the queen of the school, but now, her brother hates me, and he’s out for my blood. He thinks I’m a spy, he thinks I’ve aligned myself with the sociopath drug addict who walks the halls with murder on his mind. Every choice I make is being watched; there are more eyes on me than the privileged guys who want me gone.

Rebecca Waterhouse is just 13 when she witnesses her mother's death at the hand of her father in Seaview Cottage. But what else did she see? Years later, Rebecca's daughters Iris and Jessie know their mother will never speak of that terrible night. But when Jessie goes missing, with her gravely ill newborn, Iris realises the past may hold the key to her sister's disappearance.