Showing titles in Coming of Age

Kentucky was only ever going to be a summer job. Come fall, Blue Riley would be back in North Carolina, in college. But one job led to another, one town led to another, and one woman led to another. Now, after twenty years Blue faces the hardest question of all - is it time to go home?

Despite the lingering wounds of his past relationship, Peter is ready to take a chance on finding love and embracing his true self. Peter and Daniel explore their connection despite Daniel's complicated home life. But when Adam resurfaces, desperate to win Peter back, Peter must confront his complicated feelings and the painful ghosts of their shared past.

Travesti este un studiu de caz despre un copil hermafrodit, dar şi o explorare a întunecatei sexualităţi adolescentine. Mai presus de orice, însă, acest mic roman, care m-a obsedat şi m-a chinuit mai mult decât orice altă carte a mea, e anabasis-ul meu, drumul meu ascuns şi întortochiat către centrul adânc îngropat al fiinţei mele. Travesti este şi portalul către Orbitor. Trilogia mea n-ar fi putut exista fără exerciţiul de sinceritate aproape sinucigaşă de aici. Nu e uşor să afli cine eşti, nici să te priveşti în ochi după ce ai aflat.

A bildungsroman set over three acts, Ponyboy is a quest for self-identity set among the art world of Paris and Berlin. In the first act, Ponyboy's eponymous narrator - a pill-popping, speed-snorting trans-masculine lightning bolt - unravels in his Paris apartment. Ponyboy is caught in a messy love triangle with Baby, a lesbian painter who can't see herself being with someone trans, and Toni, a childhood friend who can actually see Ponyboy for who he is. Strung out, Ponyboy follows Baby to Berlin in act two, where he sinks deeper into drugs and falls for a fellow writer.

Uprooted from her comfortable life in Bogotá, Colombia, into an ant-infested Miami townhouse, 15-year-old Francisca is miserable and friendless in her strange new city. Her alienation grows when her mother is swept up into an evangelical church, replete with Christian salsa, abstinent young dancers, and baptisms for the dead. But there, Francisca also meets the magnetic Carmen: opinionated and charismatic, head of the youth group, and the pastor’s daughter. As her mother’s mental health deteriorates and her grandmother descends into alcoholism, Francisca falls in love with Carmen.

On the cusp of adulthood, James dreams of another life far away from his small village. His burgeoning desire – an ache for autonomy, tenderness and sex – threatens to unravel his shy exterior. Then he meets Luke. Unkempt and handsome, charismatic and impulsive, he has been sent to live with his aunt and uncle on a nearby farm. Luke comes with a reputation for danger, yet underneath his bravado lie anxieties and hopes of his own. As the seasons pass, and the pair form an ever-changing bond, James falls into a terrifying first love that will transform his life forever.

At a meatpacking facility in Missouri, Dee-Dee and her coworkers kill and butcher 40,000 chickens in a single shift. The work is repetitive and brutal, with each stab and cut a punishment to her hands and joints, but Dee-Dee's more concerned with what is happening inside her body. After a series of devastating miscarriages, Dee-Dee has found herself pregnant, and she is determined to carry this child to term.

Mallory sees the woman for the first time at her college gym and is immediately transfixed. As a naturally reserved person who is now reeling from the loss of her mother, Mallory finds herself compelled by the woman's assurance and longs to know her better. Despite the discovery that she is a professor at the college, Mallory finds herself falling into a complicated love affair with the woman, the stakes of which she never quite understands.

Lisa and Elliot have been best friends ever since the day they met as children. Popular, bright and sporty, Lisa was Elliot's biggest supporter when the school bullies made his life a misery, and for that, he will always be grateful. Twenty years later, life has pulled the pair apart, and Lisa is struggling. Her marriage is floundering, her teenage kids are being secretive and she's so tired she can't think straight. So when Elliot knocks on the door, looking much better than she remembers, she can't help but be delighted to see her old friend again.

Elsa is struggling. Her formative, exhilarating relationship – with an older couple – has abruptly ended, leaving her depressed and directionless in her childhood bedroom. In the relationship’s wake, Elsa scrolls aimlessly through the internet in search of meaning. Faithfully, her screen provides a new obsession: a charismatic young actor whose latest feature is a gay love story that illuminates Elsa’s crisis. And then, as if she had conjured him, the actor arrives in her hometown, with an entourage of fellow actors, writers, and directors, for the annual theatre festival.

It is June and our ten-year-old heroine is sad. She knows she will not get to leave her neighbourhood that summer, and the beach is far, far away. And that clouds like the bottom of a donkey's belly will hover all summer over her town, high among the volcanoes of northern Tenerife. But she has a best friend, Isora. And she likes everything about Isora. The colour of her arms and her hair and her eyes. Her handwriting and the way she writes the letter g with a huge tail. The way she calls her Shit because poop is a beautiful thing like the mist round the pines.

Joyful, defiant and dazzling, this is the story of Rafi Aziz—a Northern boy dreaming of his name up in lights. It's 1981 in the suburbs of Blackburn and, as Rafi's mother reminds him daily, the family moved here from Pakistan to give him the best opportunities. But Rafi longs to follow his own path. Flamboyant, dramatic and musically gifted, he wants to be a Bollywood star.

Moving from a Midwestern college to the Stonewall Tavern on the night of the first gay uprising - and populated by eloquent queens, butch poseurs, and a fearfully incompetent shrink - The Beautiful Room is Empty conflates the acts of coming out and coming of age.

August is a God-fearing track star who leaves Enugu City to attend university and escape his overbearing sisters. He carries the weight of their lofty expectations, the shame of facing himself, and the haunting memory of a mother he never knew. It's his first semester and pressures aside, August is making friends and doing well in his classes. He even almost has a girlfriend. There's only one problem: he can't stop thinking about Segun, an openly gay student who works at a local cybercafé.

Moving between Ireland, Scotland and London, Something About Her is a story about the fragility and transformative power of first love. With vivid insight and tenderness, it exposes the fear, hope, and longing that can consume us, particularly when there’s so much you still don’t know about love, about life, and about yourself.

In Tamil Nadu, India, a boy is born with blue skin. His father sets up an ashram, and the family makes a living off of the pilgrims who seek the child’s blessings and miracles, believing young Kalki to be the 10th human incarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu. In Kalki’s 10thyear, he is confronted with three trials that will test his power and prove his divine status and, his father tells him, spread his fame worldwide. While he seems to pass them, Kalki begins to question his divinity.

In the summer of 1973, teenage Ruth and her four friends are obsessed with pre-Raphaelite paintings and a little bit obsessed with each other. They spend the scorching summer days in the river by Ruth's grand family home, pretending to be the drowning Ophelia and recreating tableaus of other tragic mythical heroines. But by the end of the summer, real tragedy has found them. Twenty-four years later, Ruth is a wife and mother of three children and moves her family into her still-grand, but now somewhat dilapidated, childhood home following the death of her father.

Long ago, Andrew made a childhood wish and kept it in a silver box. When it finally comes true, he wishes he hadn’t.... Long ago, Ben made a promise, and he had a dream: to travel to Africa to volunteer at a lion reserve. When he finally makes it, it isn’t for the reasons he imagined.... Ben and Andrew keep meeting in unexpected places, and the intense relationship that develops seems to be guided by fate. Or is it? What if the very thing that draws them together is tainted by past secrets that threaten everything?

Meet Sofie. The history of her sexuality begins when she loses her virginity to Walter the recruitment consultant. So, naturally, she thought that things could only improve from there. But she was wrong. It seems Sofie's been wrong about a lot of things. First, she thought she was into men: wrong. Then she met Frida and thought she was set for life: wrong again. Turns out, facing up to everything she thought she knew about herself requires a lot of trial and error.

Desperate to quell her addiction to drugs, disastrous romance, and '90s San Francisco, Michelle heads south for LA. But soon it's officially announced that the world will end in one year, and life in the sprawling metropolis becomes increasingly weird. While living in an abandoned bookstore, dating Matt Dillon, and keeping an eye on the encroaching apocalypse, Michelle begins a new novel, a sprawling and metatextual exploration to complement her promises of maturity and responsibility.