Showing titles in Coming of Age

It’s a New Jersey summer in 1967, and thirteen-year-old Ravi Ramanathan has the makings of a tennis prodigy. His surgeon father encourages his ambition, while his mother dreams of their only child following his father’s path. Surrounded by his parents’ love, Ravi chafes a bit at their daily routines and little traditions. Then one unexpected day, everything changes. Realizing how much he took for granted, Ravi must grow up overnight and find a new role in the life of his family.

Sam’s life is on track. She has the perfect doctor fiancé, Jack (his strict routines are a good thing, really), a great job in Manhattan (unless they fire her), and is about to tour a wedding venue near her family’s Long Island beach house. Everything should go to plan, yet the minute she arrives, Sam senses something is off. Wyatt is here. Her Wyatt. But there’s no reason for a thirty-year-old engaged woman to feel panicked around the guy who broke her heart when she was seventeen. Right?

As the child of a Hooters waitress and an ex-pro wrestler, Margo Millet's always known she’d have to make it on her own. So she enrolls at her local junior college, even though she can’t imagine how she’ll ever make a living. She’s still figuring things out and never planned to have an affair with her English professor—and while the affair is brief, it isn’t brief enough to keep her from getting pregnant. Despite everyone’s advice, she decides to keep the baby, mostly out of naiveté and a yearning for something bigger.

A modern masterpiece from one of Italy's most acclaimed authors, My Brilliant Friend is a rich, intense, and generous-hearted story about two friends, Elena and Lila, who represent the story of a nation and the nature of friendship.

Littleport, Maine, has always felt like two separate towns: an ideal vacation enclave for the wealthy, whose summer homes line the coastline, and a simple harbor community for the year-round residents whose livelihoods rely on service to the visitors. Typically, fierce friendships never develop between a local and a summer girl - but that’s just what happens with visitor Avery Greer and Littleport resident Sadie Loman. Each summer for almost a decade, the girls are inseparable - until Sadie is found dead.

Northern California, during the violent end of the 1960s. At the start of summer, a lonely and thoughtful teenager, Evie Boyd, sees a group of girls in the park and is immediately caught by their freedom, their careless dress, their dangerous aura of abandon. Soon Evie is in thrall to Suzanne, a mesmerizing older girl, and is drawn into the circle of a soon-to-be infamous cult and the man who is its charismatic leader.

It is the story of 11-year-old Pecola Breedlove--a black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others--who prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different. This is the story of the nightmare at the heart of her yearning and the tragedy of its fulfillment.

Lucy Albright is far from her Long Island upbringing when she arrives on the campus of her small California college and happy to be hundreds of miles from her mother, whom she's never forgiven for an act of betrayal in her early teen years. Quickly grasping at her fresh start, Lucy embraces college life and all it has to offer - new friends, wild parties, stimulating classes. And then she meets Stephen DeMarco. Charming. Attractive. Complicated. Devastating.

Meet Grace Bernard. Daughter, sister, colleague, friend, serial killer. Grace has lost everything. And now she wants revenge.

In the company of a young girl and an old man, Chakas begins an epic journey across a lost and damaged Halo ringworld in search of a way home, an explanation for the warrior spirits rising up within, and the reason for the Forerunner Librarian’s tampering with human destiny.

Sometimes you’re so busy writing other people’s stories that you can lose the plot of your own. This wasn’t how Kelsey Worthington’s day was supposed to go. She wasn’t supposed to be picking up Starbucks for her smarmy boss. She wasn’t supposed to get hit by a car that jumped the curb. And she certainly wasn’t supposed to wake up in a hospital room next to Georgina Tate—the legendary matriarch of New York City businesswomen.

Set in a small-town North Carolina amusement park in 1973, Joyland tells the story of the summer in which college student Devin Jones comes to work as a carny and confronts the legacy of a vicious murder, the fate of a dying child, and the ways both will change his life forever. Joyland is a brand-new novel and has never previously been published.

As she races along Canada's Douglas Channel in her speedboat - heading toward the place where her younger brother Jimmy, presumed drowned, was last seen - 20-year-old Lisamarie Hill recalls her younger days. A volatile and precocious Native girl growing up in Kitamaat, the Haisla Indian reservation located 500 miles north of Vancouver, Lisa came of age standing with her feet firmly planted in two different worlds.

In eight interconnected, finely wrought stories, Margaret Laurence recreates the world of Vanessa MacLeod–a world of scrub-oak, willow, and chokecherry bushes; of family love and conflict; and of a girl’s growing awareness of and passage into womanhood. The stories blend into one masterly and moving whole: poignant, compassionate, and profound in emotional impact.

When Warren has the opportunity to live with a female roommate, he instantly agrees. It could be an exciting change. Or maybe not. Especially when that roommate is the cold and seemingly calculating Bridgette. Tensions run high and tempers flare as the two can hardly stand to be in the same room together. But Warren has a theory about Bridgette: anyone who can hate with that much passion should also have the capability to love with that much passion. And he wants to be the one to test this theory.

Arlo Dilly is young, handsome, and eager to meet the right girl. He also happens to be DeafBlind, a Jehovah’s Witness, and under the strict guardianship of his controlling uncle. His chances of finding someone to love seem slim to none. And yet, it happened once before: Many years ago, at a boarding school for the Deaf, Arlo met the love of his life—a mysterious girl with onyx eyes and beautifully expressive hands which told him the most amazing stories. But tragedy struck, and their love was lost forever.

You've met the men of BAM. Now get to know the rebel. Who is Reid Matthews? A child, abandoned and unloved. A teen, adrift and disregarded, using his superior tech skills for the wrong intentions. A young adult, his future overshadowed by his prison record, his life an endless loop of loneliness. Until he is given a second chance and a new life emerges. A career he once thought he could only dream of, surrounded by people who show him that family and home aren't simply words. And a girl who shows him the greatest, most complex code he could ever write. Love.

When her first-love-turned-close-friend, Gabe, dies unexpectedly at twenty-nine, thirty-year-old Julia is launched into an intercontinental quest to recover his lost possessions. Her journey takes her from Los Angeles to London and into the murky realm of the past. It also sets Julia on a collision course with the last woman he loved, a guarded, self-possessed florist and restaurateur named Elizabeth, who insists on withholding Gabe’s beloved guitar—one of the departed indie rock musician’s dearest belongings—for reasons Julia can’t understand.

1938. Gillian Larking, lonely and away at boarding school, is used to going unnoticed. But then she meets Violet Claybourne, her vibrant roommate who takes Gilly under her wing. Violet is unlike anyone Gilly has ever met, and she regales Gilly with tales of her grand family estate and her two elegant sisters. Gilly is soon entranced by stories of the Claybournes, so when Violet invites Gilly to meet her family at Thornleigh Hall, she can't believe her luck. But Gilly soon finds that behind the grand façade of Thornleigh Hall, darkness lurks.

Evelyn Thomas's plans for celebrating her twenty-first birthday in Las Vegas were big. Huge. But she sure never meant to wake up on the bathroom floor with a hangover to rival the black plague, a very attractive half-naked tattooed man in her room, and a diamond on her finger large enough to scare King Kong. Now if she could just remember how it all happened.