Category

Narrative Theme: Coming of Age

Bitter Sweet
At twenty-three, Charlie's dreams are coming true. She's landed a publishing assistant job at a historic London publishing house, moved into a stunning townhome with two of the most glamorous and generous people she’s ever met, and her favorite author, the award-winning, generation-defining,...
Black Swan Green
Black Swan Green tracks a single year in what is, for thirteen-year-old Jason Taylor, the sleepiest village in muddiest Worcestershire in a dying Cold War England, 1982. But the thirteen chapters, each a short story in its own right, create an exquisitely observed world that is anything but sleepy....
Bootleg Stardust
It’s 1974. The music world is rocking with bellbottoms, platform shoes, and lots and lots of drugs. This year’s sensation is an American band called Downtown Exit and their latest album has just gone gold. For high school dropout Levi Jaxon, things aren’t so great. After bouncing around foster...
Boston Adventure
Growing up in a fishing village north of Boston between the wars, Sonie, the child of immigrants, is so poor that she must “sleep on a pallet made of old coats and comforters.” She can only dream of the feather beds and perfumed soap to be found in the great city across the bay. In the summers,...
About Grace
David Winkler begins life in Anchorage, Alaska, a quiet boy drawn to the volatility of weather and obsessed with snow. Sometimes he sees things before they happen—a man carrying a hatbox will be hit by a bus; Winkler will fall in love with a woman in a supermarket. When David dreams that his infant...
A Boy
Boyhood, Book 1
Ridiculed by his classmates and beset by aloof parents and a cruel sister, the unnamed narrator of Edmund White’s first autobiographical novel finds solace in literature, works of art, and his own fantastic imagination. But as he strives to forge new friendships, his yearning to be loved by the men...
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Christopher John Francis Boone knows all the countries of the world and their capitals and every prime number up to 7,057. Although gifted with a superbly logical brain, Christopher is autistic. Everyday interactions and admonishments have little meaning for him. At fifteen, Christopher’s carefully...
Dandelion Wine
Dandelion Wine follows twelve-year-old Douglas Spaulding during the summer of 1928 in the small town of Green Town, Illinois. One morning, Douglas experiences a sudden realization that he is alive, a discovery that transforms the ordinary events of summer into something magical and profound. As the...
Dear Edward
One summer morning, twelve-year-old Edward Adler, his beloved older brother, his parents, and 183 other passengers board a flight in Newark headed for Los Angeles. Among them are a Wall Street wunderkind, a young woman coming to terms with an unexpected pregnancy, an injured veteran returning from...
Dirt Road

Dirt Road 2017

After his mother’s recent death, sixteen–year–old Murdo and his father travel from their home in rural Scotland to Alabama to be with his émigré uncle and American aunt. Stopping at a small town on their way from the airport, Murdo happens upon a family playing zydeco music and joins them, leaving...
Drown

Drown 1997

A coming-of-age story of unparalleled power, Drown introduced the world to Junot Díaz's exhilarating talents. It also introduced an unforgettable narrator— Yunior, the haunted, brilliant young man who tracks his family’s precarious journey from the barrios of Santo Domingo to the tenements of...
The Dutch House
At the end of the Second World War, Cyril Conroy combines luck and a single canny investment to begin an enormous real estate empire, propelling his family from poverty to enormous wealth. His first order of business is to buy the Dutch House, a lavish estate in the suburbs outside of Philadelphia....
Earthlings

Earthlings 2021

As a child, Natsuki doesn’t fit in with her family. Her parents favor her sister, and her best friend is a plush toy hedgehog named Piyyut, who talks to her. He tells her that he has come from the planet Popinpobopia on a special quest to help her save the Earth. One summer, on vacation with her...
Edwin Mullhouse
As a memorial, Edwin Mullhouse's best friend, Jeffrey Cartwright, decides that the life of this great American writer must be told. He follows Edwin's development from his preverbal first noises through his love for comic books to the fulfillment of his literary genius in the remarkable novel,...
The Enchantment of Lily Dahl
Lily Dahl, the young heroine of Siri Hustvedt's riveting novel, The Enchantment of Lily Dahl, is a strong, beautiful and daring nineteen year old girl poised on the brink of womanhood. In the small town of Webster, Minnesota, Lily's life revolves around the Ideal Café. She lives above the café in a...
An Experiment in Love
It was the year after Chappaquiddick, and all spring Carmel McBain had watery dreams about the disaster. Now she, Karina, and Julianne were escaping the dreary English countryside for a London University hall of residence. Interspersing accounts of her current position as a university student with...
Girl
Fifteen-year-old Mina’s whole world is her two best friends, but after an unexpected kiss, the established dynamics of their trio quickly unravel. Everything that was once shared openly, from clothes to secrets, now feels impossibly fragile. Loyalties shift and tensions simmer across the long days...
The Hard Blue Sky
West of New Orleans among a few small Gulf islands lies the Isle aux Chiens, a tiny, impoverished strip of land burdened by intolerable heat and roaming packs of wild dogs. Here a handful of Creole families eke out a meager existence by fishing the Gulf waters. Such is the fate of Al Landry and his...
Hazel Says No
Hazel Blum, please report to the principal’s office. Hazel Blum. When Hazel Blum's father gets a tenured job at a prestigious college, she and her family relocate from the hustle and bustle of Brooklyn to a middle-of-nowhere college town in Maine. With her mother Claire, a clothing designer, and...
The Heart
Cyril Avery is not a real Avery -- or at least, that's what his adoptive parents tell him. And he never will be. But if he isn't a real Avery, then who is he? Born out of wedlock to a teenage girl cast out from her rural Irish community and adopted by a well-to-do if eccentric Dublin couple via the...
Heaven

Heaven 2022

In Heaven, a shy high-school student is subjected to bullying from his classmates and the only person capable of understanding his ordeal is a young classmate who suffers similar treatment at the hands of her tormentors. Each finds in the other a unique sensibility capable of offering not only...
In the City
Like all young people who move to Manhattan from elsewhere, Pauline sees her arrival in the city as an escape from the provincial entrapments of home. She seeks something more than her quiet life with her rough-mannered family in bucolic Newark, New Jersey: a frugal but free-wheeling existence among...
The Invisible Circus
The political drama and familial tensions of the 1960s form a backdrop for the world of Phoebe O’Connor, age eighteen, in 1978. Phoebe is obsessed with the memory and death of her sister Faith, a beautiful idealistic hippie who died in Italy in 1970. In order to find out the truth about Faith’s life...
Leaving Atlanta
It was the end of summer, a summer during the two-year nightmare in which Atlanta's African-American children were vanishing and twenty-nine would be found murdered by 1982. Here fifth-grade classmates Tasha Baxter, Rodney Green, and Octavia Harrison will discover back-to-school means facing...
Leaving Home
At twenty-six, Emma Roberts comes to the painful realization that if she is ever to become truly independent, she must leave her comfortable London flat and venture into the wider world. This entails not only breaking free from a claustrophobic relationship with her mother, but also shedding her...
Lessons

Lessons 2023

When the world is still counting the cost of the Second World War and the Iron Curtain has closed, eleven-year-old Roland Baines's life is turned upside down. Two thousand miles from his mother's protective love, stranded at an unusual boarding school, his vulnerability attracts piano teacher Miss...
Lola in the Mirror
A girl and her mother have been on the run for sixteen years, from the monster they left in their kitchen with a knife in his throat and the police who want to make them pay for his death. Home is now a van with four flat tires in a junkyard by the edge of the Brisbane River. The girl has no name,...
Lolita

Lolita 1989

Awe and exhilaration—along with heartbreak and mordant wit—abound in Lolita, which tells the story of the aging Humbert Humbert's obsession for the nymphet Dolores Haze. Lolita is also the story of a hypercivilized European colliding with the cheerful barbarism of postwar America. Most of all, it...
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny
When Sonia and Sunny first glimpse each other on an overnight train, they are immediately captivated yet also embarrassed by the fact that their grandparents had once tried to matchmake them, a clumsy meddling that served only to drive Sonia and Sunny apart. Sonia, an aspiring novelist who recently...
Long Division
Written in a voice that’s alternately humorous, lacerating, and wise, Long Division features two interwoven stories. In the first, it’s 2013: after an on-stage meltdown during a nationally televised quiz contest, fourteen-year-old Citoyen “City” Coldson becomes an overnight YouTube celebrity. The...
Lord of the Flies
After a plane crash leaves a group of boys stranded on a deserted island, they initially attempt to create a sense of order, organizing themselves with rules and responsibilities. Ralph emerges as a leader focused on rescue, while others, including the intense and charismatic Jack, become...
Loving Sabotage
The daughter of diplomats posted to Peking in the mid-seventies, she charges about the grim confines of the gated government enclave battling tirelessly against boredom, concocting a fantasy life as rich as her surroundings are bleak. During one of her tours of duty in a war that has broken out in...
Mina
In the spring of 1972, twelve-year-old Tomoko leaves her mother behind in Tokyo and boards a train alone for Ashiya, a coastal town in Japan, to stay with her aunt’s family. Tomoko’s aunt is an enigma and an outlier in her working-class family, and her magnificent home—and handsome foreign husband,...
Moshi Moshi
In Moshi Moshi, Yoshie’s much–loved musician father has died in a suicide pact with an unknown woman. It is only when Yoshie and her mother move to Shimokitazawa, a traditional Tokyo neighborhood of narrow streets, quirky shops, and friendly residents that they can finally start to put their painful...
The Mountain Lion
Eight-year-old Molly and her ten-year-old brother Ralph are inseparable, in league with each other against the stodgy and stupid routines of school and daily life; against their prim mother and prissy older sisters; against the world of authority and perhaps the world itself. One summer they are...
My Brilliant Friend
My Brilliant Friend is a rich, intense, and generous-hearted story about two friends, Elena and Lila. Ferrante’s inimitable style lends itself perfectly to a meticulous portrait of these two women that is also the story of a nation and a touching meditation on the nature of friendship. The story...
No Bones

No Bones 2002

No Bones is a book about feelings, family, sex, and Ireland―but don't tell Amelia that. She's the one growing up in the mad family, in the mad society, who doesn't want to know what's going on. But things are going on: eight-year-olds collecting very peculiar treasure; babies who might be, or might...
Old School

Old School 2004

The protagonist of Tobias Wolff’s shrewdly—and at times devastatingly—observed first novel is a boy at an elite prep school in 1960. He is an outsider who has learned to mimic the negligent manner of his more privileged classmates. Like many of them, he wants more than anything on earth to become a...
On Chesil Beach
It is 1962, and Florence and Edward are celebrating their wedding in a hotel on the Dorset coast. Yet as they dine, the expectation of their marital duties become overwhelming. Unbeknownst to them both, the decisions they make this night will resonate throughout their lives. With exquisite prose,...
One Hundred Days
Sixteen and pregnant, Karuna finds herself trapped in her mother’s Melbourne public housing apartment for one hundred days, awaiting the birth of her child—and her mother’s next move in a shocking power struggle over who will raise the baby. She writes to her unborn child, so there’s a record of...
The Only Story
One summer in the sixties, in a staid suburb south of London, nineteen-year-old Paul comes home from university and is urged by his mother to join the tennis club. There he’s partnered with Susan Macleod, a fine player who’s forty-eight, confident, witty, and married, with two nearly adult...
The Other

The Other 2009

John William Barry and Neil Countryman shared a love of the outdoors, trekking often into Washington's remote backcountry where they had to rely on their wits—and each other—to survive. Soon after graduating from college, Neil sets out on a path that will lead him toward a life as a devoted...
Appetite

Appetite 2026

How far will you go to feed your ambitions? Zarina, a prep cook at a fancy New Haven restaurant, is underpaid, overworked, and might as well be invisible. The only upside: they get to take home leftover ingredients. Every night, Zarina whips up modern spins on the Bangladeshi dishes she grew up...
Recitatif

Recitatif 2022

In this 1983 short story—the only short story Morrison ever wrote—we meet Twyla and Roberta, who have known each other since they were eight years old and spent four months together as roommates in St. Bonaventure shelter. Inseparable then, they lose touch as they grow older, only later to find each...
The Risk Pool
His father, Sam, cultivates bad habits so assiduously that he is stuck at the bottom of his auto insurance risk pool. His mother, Jenny, is slowly going crazy from resentment at a husband who refuses either to stay or to stay away. As Ned veers between allegiances to these grossly inadequate role...
Sea Monsters
One autumn afternoon in Mexico City, seventeen–year–old Luisa does not return home from school. Instead, she boards a bus to the Pacific coast with Tomás, a boy she barely knows. He seems to represent everything her life is lacking—recklessness, impulse, independence. Tomás may also help Luisa...
Selection Day
Manjunath Kumar is fourteen and living in a slum in Mumbai. He knows he is good at cricket—if not as good as his older brother, Radha. He knows that he fears and resents his domineering and cricket-obsessed father, admires his brilliantly talented sibling, and is fascinated by curious scientific...
Shelter

Shelter 2002

Shelter is an astonishing portrayal of an American loss of innocence as witnessed by a mysterious drifter named Parson, two young sisters, Lenny and Alma, and a feral boy called Buddy. Together they come to understand bravery and the importance of compassion. Phillips unearths a dangerous beauty in...
She
Meet Dolores Price. She’s thirteen, wise-mouthed but wounded, having bid her childhood goodbye. Beached like a whale in front of her bedroom TV, she spends the next few years nourishing herself with the Mallomars, potato chips, and Pepsi her anxious mother supplies. When she finally rolls into young...
Shuggie Bain
Shuggie Bain is the unforgettable story of young Hugh “Shuggie” Bain, a sweet and lonely boy who spends his 1980s childhood in run-down public housing in Glasgow, Scotland. Thatcher’s policies have put husbands and sons out of work, and the city’s notorious drugs epidemic is waiting in the...
Moshi Moshi

80 Moshi Moshi 2016

In Moshi Moshi, Yoshie’s much–loved musician father has died in a suicide pact with an unknown woman. It is only when Yoshie and her mother move to Shimokitazawa, a traditional Tokyo neighborhood of narrow streets, quirky shops, and friendly residents that they can finally start to put their painful...
My Brilliant Friend
My Brilliant Friend is a rich, intense, and generous-hearted story about two friends, Elena and Lila. Ferrante’s inimitable style lends itself perfectly to a meticulous portrait of these two women that is also the story of a nation and a touching meditation on the nature of friendship. The story...
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Christopher John Francis Boone knows all the countries of the world and their capitals and every prime number up to 7,057. Although gifted with a superbly logical brain, Christopher is autistic. Everyday interactions and admonishments have little meaning for him. At fifteen, Christopher’s carefully...
Appetite

Appetite August 4, 2026

How far will you go to feed your ambitions? Zarina, a prep cook at a fancy New Haven restaurant, is underpaid, overworked, and might as well be invisible. The only upside: they get to take home leftover ingredients. Every night, Zarina whips up modern spins on the Bangladeshi dishes she grew up...
Dandelion Wine

Dandelion Wine July 21, 2026

Dandelion Wine follows twelve-year-old Douglas Spaulding during the summer of 1928 in the small town of Green Town, Illinois. One morning, Douglas experiences a sudden realization that he is alive, a discovery that transforms the ordinary events of summer into something magical and profound. As the...
Bitter Sweet

Bitter Sweet July 7, 2026

At twenty-three, Charlie's dreams are coming true. She's landed a publishing assistant job at a historic London publishing house, moved into a stunning townhome with two of the most glamorous and generous people she’s ever met, and her favorite author, the award-winning, generation-defining,...
What Gentlemen Do

What Gentlemen Do June 23, 2026

Waylon Gans did not mean to start a riot on the university campus. He was only there because he wanted to be in the audience while one of his heroes, Josh Modley, recorded a live podcast. The problem, as Waylon sees it, is that he is trash: he lives in Walleye, a town everyone wants to leave; his...
Villa Coco

Villa Coco June 9, 2026

An aspiring archivist determined to begin a “serious” life after an undistinguished undergraduate career takes up residence in the Italian countryside. Here, he becomes the all-purpose assistant to the Baronessa, known to her friends as Coco, a defiantly youthful and naturally flamboyant woman of...
Girl

Girl's Girl June 2, 2026

Fifteen-year-old Mina’s whole world is her two best friends, but after an unexpected kiss, the established dynamics of their trio quickly unravel. Everything that was once shared openly, from clothes to secrets, now feels impossibly fragile. Loyalties shift and tensions simmer across the long days...
Hazel Says No

Hazel Says No June 2, 2026

Hazel Blum, please report to the principal’s office. Hazel Blum. When Hazel Blum's father gets a tenured job at a prestigious college, she and her family relocate from the hustle and bustle of Brooklyn to a middle-of-nowhere college town in Maine. With her mother Claire, a clothing designer, and...
In the City

In the City May 19, 2026

Like all young people who move to Manhattan from elsewhere, Pauline sees her arrival in the city as an escape from the provincial entrapments of home. She seeks something more than her quiet life with her rough-mannered family in bucolic Newark, New Jersey: a frugal but free-wheeling existence among...
Twice

Twice October 7, 2025

When he is eight years old, Alfie Logan discovers the magical ability to get a second chance at everything. He can undo any moment and live it again. The one catch: he must accept the consequences of his second try—for better or worse. He grows up correcting his mistakes and saving himself from...
The Weight

The Weight September 2, 2025

Edie comes into the world calmly as the adults around her rage. Her father is a cruel man who beats her mother regularly and much of Edie’s young life is spent trying to escape this tyrant. “Why doesn’t she ever cry?…Gives me the creeps.” Of course, being a child means she lives a child’s life—she...
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny
When Sonia and Sunny first glimpse each other on an overnight train, they are immediately captivated yet also embarrassed by the fact that their grandparents had once tried to matchmake them, a clumsy meddling that served only to drive Sonia and Sunny apart. Sonia, an aspiring novelist who recently...
One Hundred Days

One Hundred Days December 10, 2024

Sixteen and pregnant, Karuna finds herself trapped in her mother’s Melbourne public housing apartment for one hundred days, awaiting the birth of her child—and her mother’s next move in a shocking power struggle over who will raise the baby. She writes to her unborn child, so there’s a record of...
Lola in the Mirror

Lola in the Mirror September 17, 2024

A girl and her mother have been on the run for sixteen years, from the monster they left in their kitchen with a knife in his throat and the police who want to make them pay for his death. Home is now a van with four flat tires in a junkyard by the edge of the Brisbane River. The girl has no name,...
Mina

Mina's Matchbox August 13, 2024

In the spring of 1972, twelve-year-old Tomoko leaves her mother behind in Tokyo and boards a train alone for Ashiya, a coastal town in Japan, to stay with her aunt’s family. Tomoko’s aunt is an enigma and an outlier in her working-class family, and her magnificent home—and handsome foreign husband,...
Sweetness in the Skin

Sweetness in the Skin April 23, 2024

Pumkin Patterson is a thirteen-year-old girl living in a tiny two-room house in Kingston, Jamaica, with her grandmother (who wants to improve the family’s social standing), her Aunt Sophie (who dreams of a new life in Paris for her and Pumkin), and her mother Paulette (who’s rarely home). When...
Tom Lake

Tom Lake August 1, 2023

In the spring of 2020, Lara’s three daughters return to the family's orchard in Northern Michigan. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the story of Peter Duke, a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance years before at a theater company called Tom Lake. As...
Lessons

Lessons July 25, 2023

When the world is still counting the cost of the Second World War and the Iron Curtain has closed, eleven-year-old Roland Baines's life is turned upside down. Two thousand miles from his mother's protective love, stranded at an unusual boarding school, his vulnerability attracts piano teacher Miss...
Leaving Atlanta

Leaving Atlanta March 14, 2023

It was the end of summer, a summer during the two-year nightmare in which Atlanta's African-American children were vanishing and twenty-nine would be found murdered by 1982. Here fifth-grade classmates Tasha Baxter, Rodney Green, and Octavia Harrison will discover back-to-school means facing...
Heaven

Heaven August 16, 2022

In Heaven, a shy high-school student is subjected to bullying from his classmates and the only person capable of understanding his ordeal is a young classmate who suffers similar treatment at the hands of her tormentors. Each finds in the other a unique sensibility capable of offering not only...
Recitatif

Recitatif February 1, 2022

In this 1983 short story—the only short story Morrison ever wrote—we meet Twyla and Roberta, who have known each other since they were eight years old and spent four months together as roommates in St. Bonaventure shelter. Inseparable then, they lose touch as they grow older, only later to find each...
Earthlings

Earthlings September 21, 2021

As a child, Natsuki doesn’t fit in with her family. Her parents favor her sister, and her best friend is a plush toy hedgehog named Piyyut, who talks to her. He tells her that he has come from the planet Popinpobopia on a special quest to help her save the Earth. One summer, on vacation with her...
The War for Gloria

The War for Gloria September 7, 2021

Corey Goltz grows up in the working-class outskirts of Boston as the only child of Gloria, whose ambitions were derailed early but who has always given her son everything she can. Corey, restless, dreams of leaving home for a great adventure. Instead, when he is fifteen, the world comes crashing...
Boston Adventure

Boston Adventure June 29, 2021

Growing up in a fishing village north of Boston between the wars, Sonie, the child of immigrants, is so poor that she must “sleep on a pallet made of old coats and comforters.” She can only dream of the feather beds and perfumed soap to be found in the great city across the bay. In the summers,...
Long Division

Long Division June 1, 2021

Written in a voice that’s alternately humorous, lacerating, and wise, Long Division features two interwoven stories. In the first, it’s 2013: after an on-stage meltdown during a nationally televised quiz contest, fourteen-year-old Citoyen “City” Coldson becomes an overnight YouTube celebrity. The...
Bootleg Stardust

Bootleg Stardust April 6, 2021

It’s 1974. The music world is rocking with bellbottoms, platform shoes, and lots and lots of drugs. This year’s sensation is an American band called Downtown Exit and their latest album has just gone gold. For high school dropout Levi Jaxon, things aren’t so great. After bouncing around foster...
Dear Edward

Dear Edward February 2, 2021

One summer morning, twelve-year-old Edward Adler, his beloved older brother, his parents, and 183 other passengers board a flight in Newark headed for Los Angeles. Among them are a Wall Street wunderkind, a young woman coming to terms with an unexpected pregnancy, an injured veteran returning from...
Shuggie Bain

Shuggie Bain February 11, 2020

Shuggie Bain is the unforgettable story of young Hugh “Shuggie” Bain, a sweet and lonely boy who spends his 1980s childhood in run-down public housing in Glasgow, Scotland. Thatcher’s policies have put husbands and sons out of work, and the city’s notorious drugs epidemic is waiting in the...
The Dutch House

The Dutch House September 24, 2019

At the end of the Second World War, Cyril Conroy combines luck and a single canny investment to begin an enormous real estate empire, propelling his family from poverty to enormous wealth. His first order of business is to buy the Dutch House, a lavish estate in the suburbs outside of Philadelphia....
The Only Story

The Only Story March 5, 2019

One summer in the sixties, in a staid suburb south of London, nineteen-year-old Paul comes home from university and is urged by his mother to join the tennis club. There he’s partnered with Susan Macleod, a fine player who’s forty-eight, confident, witty, and married, with two nearly adult...
Sea Monsters

Sea Monsters February 5, 2019

One autumn afternoon in Mexico City, seventeen–year–old Luisa does not return home from school. Instead, she boards a bus to the Pacific coast with Tomás, a boy she barely knows. He seems to represent everything her life is lacking—recklessness, impulse, independence. Tomás may also help Luisa...
Selection Day

Selection Day December 18, 2018

Manjunath Kumar is fourteen and living in a slum in Mumbai. He knows he is good at cricket—if not as good as his older brother, Radha. He knows that he fears and resents his domineering and cricket-obsessed father, admires his brilliantly talented sibling, and is fascinated by curious scientific...
The Virgin Suicides

The Virgin Suicides October 2, 2018

In a quiet suburb of Detroit, the five Lisbon sisters--beautiful, eccentric, and obsessively watched by the neighborhood boys--commit suicide one by one over the course of a single year. As the boys observe them from afar, transfixed, they piece together the mystery of the family's fatal melancholy,...
Strike Your Heart

Strike Your Heart September 11, 2018

Marie is the prettiest girl in her provincial high school, and dating the most popular boy in town. She is the envy of all her peers―and she loves it. But when she gives birth to Diane, things begin to change. Diane steals the hearts of all who meet her, inciting nothing but jealousy in her...
The Heart
Cyril Avery is not a real Avery -- or at least, that's what his adoptive parents tell him. And he never will be. But if he isn't a real Avery, then who is he? Born out of wedlock to a teenage girl cast out from her rural Irish community and adopted by a well-to-do if eccentric Dublin couple via the...
Dirt Road

Dirt Road July 11, 2017

After his mother’s recent death, sixteen–year–old Murdo and his father travel from their home in rural Scotland to Alabama to be with his émigré uncle and American aunt. Stopping at a small town on their way from the airport, Murdo happens upon a family playing zydeco music and joins them, leaving...
The Things We Thought We Knew
The first memory I have of you is all knickers and legs. You had flipped yourself into a handstand and couldn’t get back down. We became best friends, racing slugs, pretending to be spies – all the things that children do. Ten years later, eighteen-year-old Ravine Roy spends every day in her room....
Moshi Moshi

Moshi Moshi December 13, 2016

In Moshi Moshi, Yoshie’s much–loved musician father has died in a suicide pact with an unknown woman. It is only when Yoshie and her mother move to Shimokitazawa, a traditional Tokyo neighborhood of narrow streets, quirky shops, and friendly residents that they can finally start to put their painful...
About Grace

About Grace October 6, 2015

David Winkler begins life in Anchorage, Alaska, a quiet boy drawn to the volatility of weather and obsessed with snow. Sometimes he sees things before they happen—a man carrying a hatbox will be hit by a bus; Winkler will fall in love with a woman in a supermarket. When David dreams that his infant...
My Brilliant Friend

My Brilliant Friend October 5, 2012

My Brilliant Friend is a rich, intense, and generous-hearted story about two friends, Elena and Lila. Ferrante’s inimitable style lends itself perfectly to a meticulous portrait of these two women that is also the story of a nation and a touching meditation on the nature of friendship. The story...
The Hard Blue Sky

The Hard Blue Sky April 10, 2012

West of New Orleans among a few small Gulf islands lies the Isle aux Chiens, a tiny, impoverished strip of land burdened by intolerable heat and roaming packs of wild dogs. Here a handful of Creole families eke out a meager existence by fishing the Gulf waters. Such is the fate of Al Landry and his...
The Mountain Lion

The Mountain Lion August 10, 2010

Eight-year-old Molly and her ten-year-old brother Ralph are inseparable, in league with each other against the stodgy and stupid routines of school and daily life; against their prim mother and prissy older sisters; against the world of authority and perhaps the world itself. One summer they are...
The Wild Things

The Wild Things March 9, 2010

Max is a rambunctious eight-year-old whose world is changing around him: His father is absent, his mother is increasingly distracted, and his teenage sister has outgrown him. Sad and angry, Max dons his wolf suit and makes terrible, ruinous mischief, flooding his sister’s room and driving his mother...
Wishin

Wishin' and Hopin' November 10, 2009

Poignant and hilarious, with his latest story, Wishin' and Hopin', Wally Lamb takes a turn toward the lighthearted and laugh-provoking. In a vein similar to Jean Shepherd’s A Christmas Story and David Sedaris’s The Santaland Diaries, Lamb’s holiday tale focuses on a feisty parochial school fifth...
The Other

The Other June 2, 2009

John William Barry and Neil Countryman shared a love of the outdoors, trekking often into Washington's remote backcountry where they had to rely on their wits—and each other—to survive. Soon after graduating from college, Neil sets out on a path that will lead him toward a life as a devoted...
A Boy

A Boy's Own Story February 24, 2009

Boyhood, Book 1
Ridiculed by his classmates and beset by aloof parents and a cruel sister, the unnamed narrator of Edmund White’s first autobiographical novel finds solace in literature, works of art, and his own fantastic imagination. But as he strives to forge new friendships, his yearning to be loved by the men...
On Chesil Beach

On Chesil Beach June 10, 2008

It is 1962, and Florence and Edward are celebrating their wedding in a hotel on the Dorset coast. Yet as they dine, the expectation of their marital duties become overwhelming. Unbeknownst to them both, the decisions they make this night will resonate throughout their lives. With exquisite prose,...
The Invisible Circus

The Invisible Circus October 9, 2007

The political drama and familial tensions of the 1960s form a backdrop for the world of Phoebe O’Connor, age eighteen, in 1978. Phoebe is obsessed with the memory and death of her sister Faith, a beautiful idealistic hippie who died in Italy in 1970. In order to find out the truth about Faith’s life...
An Experiment in Love

An Experiment in Love June 12, 2007

It was the year after Chappaquiddick, and all spring Carmel McBain had watery dreams about the disaster. Now she, Karina, and Julianne were escaping the dreary English countryside for a London University hall of residence. Interspersing accounts of her current position as a university student with...
Black Swan Green

Black Swan Green February 27, 2007

Black Swan Green tracks a single year in what is, for thirteen-year-old Jason Taylor, the sleepiest village in muddiest Worcestershire in a dying Cold War England, 1982. But the thirteen chapters, each a short story in its own right, create an exquisitely observed world that is anything but sleepy....
Leaving Home

Leaving Home February 13, 2007

At twenty-six, Emma Roberts comes to the painful realization that if she is ever to become truly independent, she must leave her comfortable London flat and venture into the wider world. This entails not only breaking free from a claustrophobic relationship with her mother, but also shedding her...