Six Brilliant Reads: Coming-of-Age Fiction

The pains of growing up can be excellent fodder for stories. Sometimes called bildungsromans, coming-of-age novels aren’t just found in the young adult (YA) section of the library. Here are six terrific novels found on the adult fiction shelves that feature young characters at that point where childhood starts to meld into adulthood, with some emotional growth and lessons learned.

Western Lane by Chetna Maroo earned a spot on the Booker Prize shortlist in2023. It’s the story of an Indian family living in London who have recently lost their mother, in particular eleven-year-old Gopi. Somehow squash becomes the answer to everything, when their father signs Gopi and her sisters up for an intense training programme. Here Gopi meets Jed. This is an evocative read about first love, grief and the transformative power of sport.

Sixteen-year-old Robert Appleyard’s life is changed by an unusual friendship in The Offing by Benjamin Myers. It’s 1946 and the world still reeling from the war, as Robert escapes his father’s plans for him to work as a coalminer. He packs a few essentials and heads for the countryside where he meets Dulcie Piper, elderly and living on her own, but with a lifetime’s experience of books and culture. This is a beautiful, evocative read full of memorable settings and interesting characters.

Polly Samson is a journalist and lyricist who is married to a member of Pink Floyd and has written many of the band's song lyrics. She’s also the author of A Theatre for Dreamers, an atmospheric novel set in 1960 on the Greek island of Hydra – a magnet for poets, painters and musicians, including Leonard Cohen and his soon to be muse, Marrianne Ihlen. Here teenage Erica escapes to deal with her grief after losing her mother and hopes to fulfil her own creative interests.

Still in the 1960s, Nothing Special by Nicole Flattery follows seventeen-year-old Mae whose world is expanded enormously when she takes a typing job for Andy Warhol. Home is a bleak place with her alcoholic mother, but transcribing Warhol’s tapes offers a view into a new world of art and ideas.  She and fellow typist friend Shelley discovery new experiences on the fringe of the counter-culture movement in New York.

Also dipping back into the past, Amor Towles’ richly layered novel The Lincoln Highway takes us to 1950s America. Here eighteen-year-old Emmett Watson has been released from a juvenile detention home to the farm in Nebraska soon to be repossessed by the bank. With his father now dead, he decides to take his younger brother on a road trip to find their missing mother, only to have his plans derailed by the discovery of two friends escaped from juvie, who have plans of their own.

Sally Rooney’s novel, Normal People, examines the very different worlds of Connell and Marianne who grow up in the same town and go to the same school. Their early attraction to each other is put under pressure by their home environments, and the difficulty they each have in articulating their feelings. The story follows their different paths as each finds a place to study at Trinity College, Dublin. A sensitive and nuanced story “alternating menace with overwhelming tenderness”.

For more titles in this genre, ask for a Coming-of-Age reading list next time you visit the library.

Posted by JAM

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