Showing results for "Fiction" in Coming of Age

Inspired by Nigeria's folktales and war, Under the Udala Trees is a deeply searching, powerful debut about the dangers of living and loving openly. Ijeoma comes of age as her nation does; born before independence, she is 11 when civil war breaks out in the young republic of Nigeria. Sent away to safety, she meets another displaced child, and the star-crossed pair fall in love. They are from different ethnic communities. They are also both girls.

When Rachel falls in love with her married professor, Dr Byrne, her best friend James helps her devise a plan to seduce him. But what begins as a harmless crush soon pushes their friendship to its limits. Over the course of a year they will find their lives ever more entwined with the Byrnes' and be faced with impossible choices and a lie that can't be taken back...

Luc O'Donnell is tangentially - and reluctantly - famous. His rock-star parents split when he was young, and the father he's never met spent the next 20 years cruising in and out of rehab. Now that his dad's making a comeback, Luc's back in the public eye, and one compromising photo is enough to ruin everything. To clean up his image, Luc has to find a nice normal relationship...and Oliver Blackwood is as nice and normal as they come. He's a barrister, an ethical vegetarian, and someone who has never inspired a moment of scandal in his life. He’s perfect boyfriend material.

Fueled by tomato sandwiches and green milkshakes, and obsessed with cars, Philbet struggles with life and love as a gay boy in rural Georgia. He’s happiest when helping Grandaddy dig potatoes from the vegetable garden that connects their houses. But Philbet’s world is shattered and his resilience shaken by events that crush his innocence and sense of security; expose his misshapen chest skillfully hidden behind shirts Mama makes at home; and convince him that he’s not fit to be loved by Knox, the older boy he idolizes to distraction.

Sarah never admits that she’s his mother, but the beautiful boy has watched her survive as a “lot lizard”: a prostitute working the West Virginia truck stops. Desperate to win her love, he decides to surpass her as the best and most famous lot lizard ever.

Buying into the dream that education is the road out of poverty, a teen mom takes a chance on bettering herself, gets on welfare rolls, and talks her way into college. But once she's there, phallocratic narratives permeate every subject, and creative writing professors depend heavily on Freytag's pyramid to analyze life. So Ariel turns to a rich subcultural canon of resistance and failure, populated by writers like Audre Lorde, Tillie Olsen, and Kathy Acker. Wryly riffing on feminist literary tropes, We Were Witches documents the survival of a demonized single mother.

One of Them’s 10 Most Anticipated Books of 2025 One of Book Riot’s and The Mary Sue’s 15 Most Anticipated Queer Books of 2025 One of The Millions’, Kirkus’s, and The AV Club's Most Anticipated Books of 2025 An unforgettable and heartwarming book-club debut following a trans...

Set in the late 80s, early 90s, a time when feminism meant women could behave like men, and the gay community in London were coming out of the closet. A time of exciting change as Gen Xers were leading the way towards 3rd wave feminism, the ‘Women can have it all’ approach. That was the plan anyway. London was feeding the world the first inklings of ‘Cool Britannia’ Isabel is caught between the old static world of female conformity and the new world of female masturbation & gay porn. Under the wing of her big sister’s strident feminism, Isabel attempts to be a modern teen.

Jim, a handsome, all-American athlete, has always been shy around girls. But when he and his best friend, Bob, partake in “awful kid stuff,” the experience forms Jim’s ideal of spiritual completion. Defying his parents’ expectations, Jim strikes out on his own, hoping to find Bob and rekindle their amorous friendship.

Set in the post-martial-law era of late-1980s Taipei, Notes of a Crocodile is a coming-of-age story of queer misfits discovering love, friendship, and artistic affinity while hardly studying at Taiwan's most prestigious university. Told through the eyes of an anonymous lesbian narrator nicknamed Lazi, this cult classic is a postmodern pastiche of diaries, vignettes, mash notes, aphorisms, exegesis, and satire by an incisive prose stylist and major countercultural figure.

A young royal from the far north, is sent south for a political marriage in an empire reminiscent of imperial China. Her brothers are dead, her armies and their war mammoths long defeated and caged behind their borders. Alone and sometimes reviled, she must choose her allies carefully. Rabbit, a handmaiden, sold by her parents to the palace for the lack of five baskets of dye, befriends the emperor's lonely new wife and gets more than she bargained for.

His world was water and rhythm. Hard work and drive kept Royal O'Connell one step ahead of his competition. His spot on the swim team, keeping his scholarship, was the only plan that mattered. His world was ebony and ivory. Natural talent and ambition set Camden Morgan apart from the other music majors. His dedication scored him a full ride. Normally, their paths would have never crossed...but when Royal meets his best friend's new roommate, his big plan and Camden's controlled environment faces a variable that could destroy it all: attraction.

Meet Orlando: a young nobleman in Elizabethan England, poet, lover, adventurer—and, after a transformational sleep, a woman. Spanning over 300 years of British history, Orlando bends the rules of time, gender, and narrative as its protagonist navigates shifting societies, identities, and expectations, all while seeking something elusive: the truth of the self. Playful, profound, and radically ahead of its time, Virginia Woolf's groundbreaking novel is part love letter, part satire, and part meditation on the fluid nature of existence.

Conrad Aybinder is a boy with a secret; 16 and ready for anything. A chemistry genius, he has spent the summer on an independent-study project with his favorite teacher, Sammy Tampari. Sammy is also Conrad’s first love. But the first day of senior year, the students are informed that Mr. Tampari is dead. Rumors suggest an overdose. How can it be? Drugs are for unhappy people, Conrad is sure, not for people who have fallen in love.

An addictively gripping queer coming-of-age story about an all-consuming, insidious love affair between a college freshman and a mysterious older woman, from an unforgettable new voice in fiction. Eighteen-year-old Natalie has just arrived at her first year of university in Toronto, leaving her...

Stuck in a dead-end job, broken-hearted, broke and estranged from her best friend, Violet's life is nothing like she thought it would be. She wants more - better friends, better sex, a better job - and she wants it now. So, when Lottie - who looks like the woman Violet wants to be when she grows up - offers Violet the chance to join her exciting start-up, she bites. Only it soon becomes clear that Lottie and her husband, Simon, are not only inviting Violet into their company, they are also inviting her into their lives.

Nell and her partner Adrienne are about to have a baby. For Adrienne, it’s the start of a new life. For Nell, it’s the reason the two of them are sitting in a therapist’s office. Because she can’t go into this without dealing with the truth: that she has been a mother before, and now she can hardly bring herself to speak to her own mother, let alone return home to Ireland. Nell is running out of places to hide from her past. But to Ireland and the past is where she must go, and that is where The Amendments takes us.

Bujar inventa continuamente se stesso e la propria storia, come un impostore che si appropria dei frammenti che carpisce agli altri, del passato delle persone che ha amato, dei loro nomi, perché può scegliere chi vuole essere, il paese da cui proviene, i dettagli della propria esistenza. Perché, come dice lui stesso, «nessuno è tenuto a rimanere la persona che è nata, possiamo ricomporci come un nuovo puzzle».

It’s 1972, and eighteen-year-old tomboy Maeve O’Connor must win a photography contest to escape her suffocating, conservative family and attend her dream school in Manhattan. But where will she find arresting subjects? Why, a washed up old seaside resort called Asbury Park, New Jersey—a place where sideshow entertainers, strippers, carnies, artists, and alternative lifestyles coexist on the boardwalk in plain sight.

Ray Shepard is a wealthy architect who has mystified his friends by marrying Evelyn, a woman who works at a nail salon. Evelyn, in turn, hides a secret past about her former life in the circus, her ex-husband's mysterious death, and the colorful tattoos she carefully conceals under her clothes. When Evelyn starts to cave under the pressure of living in Ray's rarified world, she suggests they take in Ingrid, a 16-year-old girl with blue hair, a pet iguana, and no place to stay for the summer.