Showing results for "Strange" in Coming of Age

'Laini Taylor is so damn good and like no other' LEIGH BARDUGO 'Beautiful, unusual, unexpected' SABAA TAHIR The dream chooses the dreamer. Since he was five years old, Lazlo Strange has been obsessed with the mythic lost city of Weep, but it would take someone bolder than he to go in search of...

*A 'Most Anticipated Book of 2026' as selected by DAZED, THE NEW ARAB and LITHUB* 'Touching, infuriating and painfully true . . . [Strange Girls] demands to be read' Julia Armfield 'Captures the messy, tense and beautiful struggles where friendship meets longing . . . I envy whoever reads it...

Blake and Lucy were once inseparable - two girls bound by secrets, dares, and the kind of friendship that cuts deeper than blood. Until the day everything shattered. Years later, Blake's life is collapsing, and the only way to fix it is to confront the past she's tried so hard to forget. She forces herself to reach out to Lucy in a letter, a first step toward redemption. But as Blake begins to write, unsettling memories surface. Shadows she thought she'd buried twist into new shapes. And she starts to wonder: What if the strange little girl didn't stay little?

In a polygamist commune in the desert, a 14-year-old boy and a 12-year-old girl fall in love and consummate that love, breaking religious law. They are caught, and a year later, she gives birth to his father's child while the boy commits murder 400 miles away - a crime that will slowly unravel the community. 

It's summer, 1984, in blue-collar Swaffham, Massachusetts. Mel is thirteen, drinking a Slush Puppie at the drugstore, when she hears a voice, ‘deep and movie-star dramatic, like Lauren Bacall': Sylvia. What follows is a story of transgender awakening. Sylvia's shameless swagger and tough-girl trans femininity is an affront to the Swaffham locals, and her presence triggers hatred and, ultimately, violence. But it is also a catalyst for Mel. Through her friendship with Sylvia, Mel comes to realize that not only is there a world beyond Swaffham, there are other ways of being.

Wilkie Collins was born on 8th January 1824 in Marylebone, London. He pursued his education at Mr Cole’s private boarding school in Highbury, Islington. Here, he began his literary career under unusual circumstances: the school bully would give him no peace until he had been told a bedtime story. This ‘little brute’ helped create one of England’s greatest writers.