Showing results for "Room" in Coming of Age

A CLASSIC COMING-OF-AGE STORY WHICH HAS HELD GENERATIONS OF READERS SPELLBOUND Rusty, a sixteen-year-old Anglo-Indian boy, is orphaned, and has to live with his English guardian in the claustrophobic European part in Dehra Dun. Unhappy with the strict ways of his guardian, Rusty runs away from...

Barcelona 1936. Theo helps the Anarchist workers defeat the army that is trying to overthrow the democratically elected government, and he is reunited with his true love, Maria. But all too soon, his joy turns to terror as the Anarchists turn on him, led by a rival for Maria’s affection. Lucky to escape with his life, Theo returns to England to study at Oxford. But his heart is in Spain, now torn apart by a bloody civil war, and he is quick to abandon his new life when his old schoolmate Esmond offers him the chance to fight the Fascists.

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.

Lucy has her rigid middle-class life mapped out for her, until she visits Florence with her uptight cousin Charlotte, and finds her neatly ordered existence thrown off balance. Her eyes are opened by the unconventional characters she meets at the Pension Bertolini: flamboyant romantic novelist Eleanor Lavish, the Cockney Signora, curious Mr Emerson and, most of all, his passionate son George. Lucy finds herself torn between the intensity of life in Italy and the repressed morals of Edwardian England, personified in her terminally dull fiancé Cecil Vyse.

Jacob Flanders is a uniquely ambiguous protagonist: he is defined almost entirely by others’ impressions and is nearly unknowable as a result - but that does not at all detract from the vitality of Virginia Woolf’s story. In her experimental first novel, she tracks Jacob through the seemingly mundane early years of his life - from a boyhood trip to the Cornwall coast to his college years at Cambridge to his time as an adult in London and Greece - before arriving at his shocking, even tragic, entry into war.

At the age of 12, Joel Knox is summoned to meet the father who abandoned him at birth. But when Joel arrives at the decaying mansion in Skully's Landing, his father is nowhere in sight. What he finds instead is a sullen stepmother who delights in killing birds; an uncle with the face - and heart - of a debauched child; and a fearsome little girl named Idabel who may offer him the closest thing he has ever known to love.

Moving from a Midwestern college to the Stonewall Tavern on the night of the first gay uprising - and populated by eloquent queens, butch poseurs, and a fearfully incompetent shrink - The Beautiful Room is Empty conflates the acts of coming out and coming of age.

El afinador de habitaciones es una narración desbordante en la que se suceden sin descanso las filias literarias del narrador - un adolescente algo excéntrico - sus manías compulsivas, su ansiedad mitigada a base de coñac, sus encrucijadas sentimentales, obsesivas y caóticas, y las visitas de desasosegantes presencias de ultratumba. Sus pensamientos se mueven entre la inteligencia de un superdotado y la candidez de un adolescente, entre el humor más cínico y el más ingenuo del mundo.

Thomas Ransom, born to a severely dysfunctional Southern family transplanted to New York City, is left to his own devices by neglectful parents and spends his childhood shadowing his criminally inclined half brother and roaming the city with hard-drinking teenage pals. He eventually finds an outlet as the flamboyant singer of a downtown rock band, and later as the young editor of the Detroit-based magazine that invented punk, only to return to New York, at the height of the 1970s bacchanal, and crash.