Narrative theme: Coming of age Books

In Joe Baumann's newest collection Where Can I Take You When There's Nowhere To Go, queer men explore their sense of who they are and what they want, often in worlds that are tilted askew from what we might expect.Thirteen surreal short stories utilize...

'Fresh, authentic and darkly funny. It's a beautifully told story full of warmth and emotion without ever being sentimental - I absolutely loved it' Ruth Hogan, bestselling author of The Keeper of Lost ThingsIt's the heatwave summer of 1976 and...

An unforgettable story of outrunning poverty through the power of stories and imagination.In a neglected part of town beset with social problems, from unemployment and crime to inequalities of health and education, a twelve-year-old girl sees an...

Daniel Zimmer will do almost anything to end his pain-except for the one thing that might work.Growing up in 1970s Brooklyn under the shadow of his tyrannical father and against the backdrop of the Son of Sam murders, the Karen Ann Quinlan tragedy, and...

Danny is a Polack with a heart of gold. He grew up in New City, home of what was once the world's largest slaughterhouse, the Chicago Stockyards. After Danny's wife's infidelity, he stepped out of what the US calls the "white man's" world. Standing over...

Tulsi Gurung arrives in Pennsylvania on a day so impossiblydamp and gray he wonders if he's landed on the underside of the world. He issixteen and brimming with wonder and fear. Born and raised in Refugee CampGoldhap, Tulsi is technically a refugee from...

Italy's great chronicler of the macabre and hilarious terrors of growing up geeky arrives in English at last.Long before the latest vogue for auto fiction, Michele Mari, one of Italy's most beloved authors, cast his mind back to the days of his own...

For readers of Isabel Allende, Gabriela Garcia, and Julia Alvarez, the story of a woman who must fight for her love and her child in a Cuba suffocated by oppressionA free spirit who spends time near the port of Havana, where her friend Osiris is known as...

An epic, multi-perspective debut novel bringing the streets of Cairo to life.Sherif 'Sheero' Abdallah is an NYU student revelling in independence, free from the judgemental gaze of his conservative family in Egypt to indulge in all...

From the award-winning author of Over the Plain Housescomes a major novel about two young women contending with unplanned pregnancies in different eras.Edie Carrigan didn't plan to "get herself" pregnant, much less end up in a home for unwed mothers. In...

For readers of Marilynne Robinson, Elizabeth Strout, and Katie Kitamura, the indelible journey of a quiet young woman-the "silent person" in the Seder-finding her way. Hailed as "radiant and transporting" (Margot Livesey), The Promise of a Normal Life is...

Being queer in a small town? Bad. Your employer believing you stole ten thousand dollars? Worse.Abboton, IN has kept hard-partying Victor Adewale in the closet for his entire life. So he makes a deal with his stern Nigerian father: Clean up his act, hold...

In his debut collection, Marston Hefner brings a unique voice and playful style to meditations on self-acceptance, the folly of youth, and how love can lead to actualization and destruction.Through moments of family intimacy, work presentations,...

In the alternate history novel The New Empire, the world undergoes a drastic change in the 14th century when Chinese ships land on the west coast of what we know as the Bay Area of California. Fast forward four hundred years to a much different America...

A 'mesmerizing' (James McBride), 'magnificent' (Ha Jin) intergenerational coming-of-age novel set in South Korea - about friendship, belonging, and displacement.Growing up outside a US military base in South Korea in...

Winner of the Minnesota Book Award and a2022 Great Group Reads Selection "The Barrensgrabbed me from the opening pages and never let go."-Michael Punke, author ofThe RevenantTwo young women attending college decide to have a summer adventure canoeing...

It's the late 1960s in McKinney, Texas. At the downtown theater and the local drive-in, movies-James Bond, My Fair Lady, Alfie, and Dr. Zhivago-feed the dreams and obsessions of a ten-year-old Clarke who loves Audrey, Elvis, his family, and the handsome...

After growing up with an alcoholic mother and an intermittent stepfather, Alex pines for connection, even as he sabotages his life with substances, and substitutes one failed relationship for the next. Shuffling from troubled home to chaotic institution,...

Ninth Building is a fascinating collection of vignettes drawn from Zou Jingzhi's experience growing up during the Cultural Revolution, first as a boy in Beijing and then as a teenager exiled to the countryside. Zou poetically captures a side of the...

Set entirely at Wybrany College - a school where the wealthy keep their kids safe from the chaos erupting in the cities - Four by Four is a novel of insinuation and gossip, in which the truth about Wybrany's 'program' is always palpable, but never...

From the moment of its founding, the USSR was reviled and admired, demonised and idealised. Many Jews saw the new society ushered in by the Russian Revolution as their salvation from shtetl life with its deprivations and deadly pogroms. But Soviet Russia...

A stunning novel about growing up in Russia on the brink of collapse, from the preeminent storyteller of his generation From the critically acclaimed author of Oblivion comes Year of the Comet, a story of a Russian boyhood and...

Triangle Ray is a collection of short stories linked by the character of Ray Fielding, introduced first as a young black man coming of age in the 1980s and infatuated with his schoolmate, Marie. Against the wishes of their families, the two marry just...

Uprooted from Bogot into an ant-infested Miami townhouse, fifteen-year-old Francisca is miserable in her strange new city. Her alienation grows when her mother is swept up in an evangelical church, replete with abstinent salsa dancers and baptisms for...

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST DAYTON LITERARY PEACE PRIZE WINNERA stirring tale of brotherhood, coming of age, and survival during World War IThe Sojourn is the story of Jozef Vinich, who was uprooted from a 19th-century mining town in Colorado by a...

Elisa Victoria's first foray in the English language with a novel which uncovers nine-year-old Marina's internal struggles, during the long dry spell in 1993.Amid the oppressive heat, and in the aftermath of the exuberance of Seville's...

* At once a crime drama and a multigenerational family saga, KEEPING THE HOUSE is a debut that establishes Cin as one of the most exciting new writers to emerge in some time.* Tice Cin's prose is vivid and propulsive and fully immerses the reader into...

Friendship blossoms between an enigmatic girl and a whisky distiller's granddaughter on a remote Scottish island.It's the 1950s, and Lorrie is unimpressed when her family moves to the remote Scottish island where her grandad runs a whisky distillery. She...

When Wren Irving's numbers come up in the first ever national lottery draw, she doesn't tell her husband, Rob. Instead she quietly packs her bags, kisses her six-month-old daughter Phoebe goodbye, and leaves. Two decades later, Rob has moved on and found...

A single call from his Czech girlfriend catapults Trevor into a serious crisis. Desperate to get his mojo back, he blazes down Highway 99 in a rented Dodge Neon. But soon his journey to California is fraught with peril, and all he has for protection are...

A GLOBE AND MAIL BEST BOOK OF 2022AS FEATURED IN TORONTO STAR, ZOOMER MAGAZINE, AND ON CBC'S ONTARIO MORNING AND GLOBAL TVFor readers who love Mark Haddon, Miriam Toews, and Sally RooneyPaisley Ratchford is trying to keep it together, but in eight weeks,...

Book will have French flaps New title in Feminist Press's Amethyst Editions imprint: American LGBTQ+ books that present queer narratives beyond adolescent coming-out, curated by author and literary organizer Michelle Tea In some ways, this novel tells a...

This rich, raw and urgent debut novel is a domestic noir of sex and survival set in Trinidad's capital.Alethea Lopez is about to turn 40. A fashionable, mixed-race boutique manager who lives and works in Trinidad's capital city, Port of Spain, she is...

WINNER OF THE 2023 SCOTT MONCRIEFF PRIZESHORTLISTED FOR THE 2022 WARWICK PRIZE FOR WOMEN IN TRANSLATION Is it possible to make your own path in the world while upholding your family legacy? That's the question at the heart of this tender and poignant...

As Lina steps into adulthood, she turns to the work of Virginia Woolf and Patricia Highsmith for insight into who she - and her friends - will becomeIt's a typically sticky Toronto summer and Lina's spending her first couple of weeks after...

First in a series of five autobiographical novels, Aubrey McKee is a coming-of-age story for the `80s generation.A novel comprised of connected short stories about a boy coming of age in 1970-80s Halifax, Aubrey McKee is the first in a five-part series...

Winner of the City of Vancouver Book Award Longlisted for the 2023 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction Longlisted for CBC Canada Reads 2024 A riveting exploration of the complexity within mother-daughter relationships and the dynamic vitality of...

"I love books about sisters, and I love The Hive, which has all the eccentricity and yearning of some of my favorite sister stories, like We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson and Sisters By a River by Barbara Comyns. From the very first...

It's about life in our time, about being a young adult woman in the early twenty first century. Conxita, in her twenties, the latest representative of a whole generation, lost her heart somewhere between Madrid and Barcelona. A 'real spitfire' according...

As Sarah returns to campus for her final semester, the pain from the past months seems to fade away in the rearview mirror. With a renewed sense of life on the horizon, she works to adjust to the surrounding world where new romances begin and others end...

It is 1964 and the NAACP has helped to place four Negro students in the small Louisiana town of Carlton High School their senior year to begin the process of integration. Fourteen year old Lizzie Rowan's mother Louise Rowan is the senior English teacher...

Twelve-year-old Frankie Walker's whole world is baseball, Daddy, and foxhunting. Daddy's stroke forces Frankie to learn to survive on his own-or become a permanent resident of the Missouri Orphan's School and Residence. With the help of a fellow orphan,...

Punk rock legend Blag Dahlia returns with his third transgressive novel Highland FallsNina West is a deceptively petite young trickster who works at a funeral home in the suburban Illinois town of Highland Falls. Her short-term boyfriend Ace fronts the...

Big Wednesday, based on the cult 1978 film by the same name, follows three California beach buddies begin to realize there is more to life than waxing down their surfboards as they ditch their alcoholic and unruly ways to go fight in the Vietnam War...

By the Colombian author of The Bitch, a 2020 National Book Award Finalist and PEN Awards Winner.Claudia is an impressionable eight-year-old girl, trying to understand the world through the eyes of the adults around her. But her hardworking father hardly...

24 MUST-READ 2022 BOOKS IN TRANSLATION as selected by BOOK RIOT"Lebanese German author Jarawan (The Storyteller) movingly evokes life in Lebanon in his affecting and complex latest. This is a gripping, human look at a tragedy that still haunts an entire...

Rima, a young girl from Damascus, longs to walk, to be free to follow the will of her feet, but instead is perpetually constrained. Rima finds refuge in a fantasy world full of coloured crayons, secret planets, and The Little Prince, reciting passages of...

LONGLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE 2021In this honest, tender account of brotherly love, thirteen-year-old Brian is tasked with caring for his disabled older brotherThirteen-year-old Brian lives in a trailer on a forgotten patch of land with...