Showing results by publisher "W. F. Howes Ltd" in Coming of Age

It's the early 1990s, and in the Irish village of Crossmore, Lucy feels out of place. Despite her fierce friendships, she's always felt this way, and the conventional path of marriage and motherhood doesn't appeal to her at all. Not even with handsome and doting Martin, her closest childhood friend. Lucy begins to make sense of herself during a long hot summer, when a spark with her school friend Susannah escalates to an all-consuming infatuation, and, very quickly, to a desperate and devastating love.

A sensational new novel from the bestselling author of Less Than Zero and American Psycho that tracks a group of privileged Los Angeles high school friends as a serial killer strikes across the city. His first novel in 13 years, The Shards is Bret Easton Ellis at his inimitable best. Los Angeles...

Newcastle, Australia, 1972. On a sticky summer night, a choice must be made: To give in to queer desire or suppress it? To venture into the unknown or stay the course? In alternating chapters, we trace the two versions of a life that follow. In one, a teenage girl is caught kissing her neighbor and is kicked out from her home. She lands at a queer communal home in Sydney called Uranian House, where she meets the people who will forever become her family. 

‘A stunningly frank and darkly funny novel of loneliness and resilience. I loved it.’ — Bonnie Garmus, author of Lessons in Chemistry ‘In Steffie, Sian Hughes has created one of the most powerful, highly original and hilarious voices in fiction. What she suffers is almost unbearable and...

John Grady Cole is the last bewildered survivor of long generations of Texas ranchers. Finding himself cut off from the only life he has ever wanted, he sets out for Mexico with his friend Lacey Rawlins. Befriending a third boy on the way, they find a country beyond their imagining: barren and...

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...

Seventeen-year-old Noel Crowe is idling in the unexpected sunshine when Christy makes his first entrance into Faha, bringing secrets he needs to atone for. Though he can't explain it, Noel knows right then: something has changed. As the people of Faha anticipate the endlessly procrastinated advent of the electricity, and Noel navigates his own coming-of-age and his fallings in and out of love, Christy's past gradually comes to light, casting a new glow on a small world.

Abby Lamb has done it. She's found the Great Good in her husband, Ralph, and together they will start a family and put all the darkness in her childhood to rest. But then the Lambs move in with Ralph's mother, Laura, whose depression has made it impossible for her to live on her own. She's venomous and cruel, especially to Abby, who has a complicated understanding of motherhood given the way her own, now-estranged, mother raised her. When Laura takes her own life, her ghost starts to haunt Abby and Ralph in very different ways. 

Laconic, sharp and playful, 99 Nights in Logar is a stunning coming-of-age novel and a portrait of Afghanistan like no other, from an unforgettable new voice. It is 2005 in Logar, Afghanistan, and twelve-year-old Marwand has returned from America with his family for the summer. He loses the tip of his finger to the village dog, Budabash, who then escapes. Marwand's quest to find Budabash, over 99 nights, begins.

In ten dazzling stories, Saba Sams dives into the world of girlhood and immerses us in its contradictions and complexities: growing up too quickly, yet not quickly enough; taking possession of what one can, while being taken possession of; succumbing to societal pressure but also orchestrating that pressure. These young women are feral yet attentive, fierce yet vulnerable, exploited yet exploitative.

Chaurisse and Dana have a lot in common. They both grew up in Atlanta, they shop at the same stores, visit the same restaurants. But unlike Chaurisse, Dana knows the truth: that the girls share the same father. A father with two families, one of which he is determined to keep secret. When the girls meet and become friends, the unsteady balance of both their lives is threatened. Theirs is a relationship destined to explode. 

Among the settlers, slaves, and indentured servants that make the treacherous journey across the Atlantic to the New World in the early 1600s—for some, an exciting opportunity, for others, a brutal abduction—there is also Tony. As a child, his homeland on the Coromandel Coast of India becomes a trading outpost for the English; as an orphaned teenager, he finds himself kidnapped from the streets of London and bound to servitude on a Virginia plantation. But Tony is not giving up on his dreams just yet.

Ivona has returned to her childhood home to care for her father. While there, she reconnects with the man she divorced over ten years ago and finds herself welcomed into his family life by him and his wife. But when a new man enters Ivona’s life, the trio’s carefully curated dynamic is disrupted, forcing a reckoning for all involved. Slanting Towards the Sea explores what it means to come of age in a country younger than oneself, as it sets a sensual, decades-long love story against an emerging Croatia.

Lauren, who changes the man in her bed even more often than she changes course, is dating Victor but sleeping with Sean. Sean - cool, ambivalent and deeply cynical - might be in love with Lauren, but he’s not going to let that stop him from bedding Paul. Paul, as shrewd as he is passionate, is Lauren’s ex-lover and the final point in this curious triangle. From the author of American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis' The Rules of Attraction is a breathtaking tale of sex, expectation, desire and frustration.  

Odile, wise beyond her years, will surely pass the Conseil's vetting. But when she happens upon a mourning tour she wasn't supposed to see, she realizes her dear friend Edme's parents have crossed the border from the east, from twenty years in the future, to view their son still alive in Odile's present. Edme, who's so funny and light. Edme, who's a violin virtuoso at just sixteen. Edme, who's the first boy to even see Odile, to really like her.... And it's Edme who's going to die.

Hello. I'm Oliver Tate, the protagonist. I am likely to use words like protagonist and, moments later, words like twonk. My ambitions are as follows: to find out why my father sometimes stays in bed for days at a time; to find out why my mother's getting surfing lessons - and probably more - from a hippy-looking twonk; and to lose my virginity before it becomes legal - in just over a year.

Alethea Lopez is about to turn 40. Fashionable, feisty and fiercely independent, she manages a boutique in Port of Spain, but behind closed doors she's covering up bruises from her abusive partner and seeking solace in an affair with her boss. When she witnesses a woman murdered by a jealous lover, the reality of her own future comes a little too close to home. Bringing us her truth in an arresting, unsparing Trinidadian voice, Alethea unravels memories repressed since childhood and begins to understand the person she has become. Her next step is to decide the woman she wants to be.

Shanghai, 2007: Fourteen-year-old Alva has always longed for more. Raised by her American expat mother, she's never known her Chinese father, and is certain a better life awaits them in America. But when her mother announces her engagement to their wealthy Chinese landlord, Lu Fang, Alva's hopes are dashed, and so she plots for the next best thing: the American School in Shanghai. Upon admission, though, Alva is surprised to discover an institution run by an exclusive community of expats and the ever-wilder thrills of a city where foreigners can ostensibly act as they please.

Sunday 1st July NO SMOKING DAY. A momentous day! Smoking in a public place or place of work is forbidden in England. Though if you are a prisoner, an MP or a member of the Royal Family you are exempt. Adrian Mole is thirty-nine and a quarter. He lives in the country in a semi-detached converted...

Anuri's stepmother, Ophelia, is the ultimate 'mumfluencer'. Throughout Anuri's childhood, she catalogued every minute, milestone and carefully curated family outing on social media, cultivating a devoted—and sizable—following. Now twenty-five years old, life looks pretty perfect on the outside. Ophelia's fans could be forgiven for wondering why Anuri spends much of her time insulting men online for money, battling the call of alcohol, running from a PhD application, and reminding herself that she is now allowed to choose her own outfits.