Showing results for "Childhood" in Coming of Age

Elphie is a girl like any other and no other. Nothing like her parents - one beautiful, the other pious - nor her saintly sister, Nessarose. Her skin is green, her mind is cunning. One day she will command this strange and wonderful world. For now, her journey is just beginning. The road ahead is full of lessons and heartbreak, the first bruising attempts at friendship - and tantalising whispers of magic. It will lead Elphie to the doors of Shiz University, and to the girl who will change her life forever.

On an island off Ireland’s west coast strange things are afoot: two teenage boys set fires while their worlds fall apart, a couple drive out to the hills in a last-ditch effort to save their marriage, a widow seeks a stranger’s help to bury her grief and a horse crashes a house party. Adrift in the treacherous waters of small-town boredom, the residents reach out with love and cruelty, desperation and hope, in their pursuit of connection.

From the moment Ava Carson and her ten-year-old son, Toussaint, arrive at the Glenn Avenue family shelter in Philadelphia in 1985, Ava is already plotting a way out. Estranged from her own mother, Dutchess, and their home in Bonaparte, Alabama, Ava is determined to give her son the chance of a better life. But when Toussaint’s father, Cass, reappears, Ava is swept off course by his charisma and his bold vision for racial justice. As Ava becomes more enmeshed with Cass and the radical group he has created, Toussaint begins to sense the danger and threat of violence simmering all around him.

Beau Hale: She said that she was my best friend, and then one day she wasn't. I should be over this by now, it's been years, but I can't escape the memories that haunt me. Everyone around me is moving on with their life, so now I need to do the same. Tennis brought me to Columbia University, and I am quickly proving that I will not let anyone defeat me, past or present. I am in control now. Life has taught me the hard way to remember that. But after all this time, I'm still searching for an answer to the one question that is constantly burning in the back of my mind... why?

In this, perhaps Dickens' most profound and personal novel, we are invited to share in the sentimental education of Pip, the poor boy from the village forge who risks losing himself in snobbery and selfishness when he mysteriously inherits a fortune. The story moves from the bleak Kentish marshes of Pip's childhood to a thrilling climax that mingles tragedy and triumph.

Adulthood comes all too quickly when the baker’s son sets his sights on her. Offered a blood orange, Oliva—haunted by her mother’s warning, “a girl who smiles has already said yes”—spurns the fruit. Yet, this act sets into motion an unwanted courtship that will force Oliva to fight for the right to choose her own path, even though the odds of winning are steep. While America and Europe are in the throes of social change, Sicily fiercely clings to its rigid traditions, including the custom of fuitina–by which kidnappings could be disguised as elopements–which is accepted and enshrined in law.

Barrette Blake has virtually no memory of the night her world changed forever. With the unwavering support of her best friend, she tries to piece together her life and her foggy memories of that night. She’s focused and resilient, but on the inside, she’s losing hope she’ll ever be whole again. Asa Lawson has it all together - on the field that is. He dominates the college football scene, but his life is messy. He’s in love with the girl who can’t love herself after everything that’s happened to her.

It's the dawn of the 1970s, and everything is changing. Enter "The Kid", a panic-prone, hyper-imaginative boy whose life changes drastically when his father brings home an astronaut white El Camino. His birthday arms him with a pair of novelty X-Ray Specs - and as the Camino muscles them through a decade of economic and cultural turmoil, the Kid comes to believe he can see through metal, clothing, skin - to the center of the universe itself, where he imagines something monstrous.

Empathetic and highly sensitive, Alice reads other people’s moods in a heartbeat—she sees both the worst and the best in everyone without them having to say a word. But growing up, Alice’s gift marks her out as disruptive, an oddity. She and her brothers live in dread of their mother’s unpredictable temper, of whether there will be food in the house, or bills paid. And despite her being desperate to find her own way in the world, she is instead pulled tighter into the embrace of the family she feels so ambivalent about—a family even Alice can’t always see the best in.

Joel Agee’s hallucinatory first novel begins in a house with a large garden in an unnamed Mexican town in the late 1940s, where six-and-a-half-year-old Peter reads, dreams, and plays with his friends. He is a nascent explorer, artist, philosopher, mystic, and scientist. His world is still new, not yet papered over with received knowledge. And the actual world around him is a unique one in history: a community of leftist emigrés who have found refuge in Mexico from the Nazi and fascist regimes of Europe, rubbing shoulders with Mexican labor activists and leftists such as Frida Kahlo.

With some thematic overlap with Rick Moody’s The Ice Storm or what Mad Men would have been like if Sally Draper got to tell her side of the story, Little Miseries is set in Iowa and Minnesota in the '60s and '70s, a time and place when parents didn’t talk much to their children but certainly talked around them—while dipping into whiskey or rum punch, whether on a long drive, on the beach, or in the comfort of their own home. Little Miseries is a tribute to what it means to come into awareness, to be a part of a family unit, and to bear responsibility for those you loved.

It’s the dawn of the 1970s. Enter "The Kid", a panic-prone, hyper-imaginative boy whose life changes drastically when his father brings home an astronaut-white El Camino. As the car becomes a catalyst for the Kid’s curiosity, his ailing, over-protective mother finds herself fending off questions she doesn’t want to answer. But her attempt to redirect him only arms him with the tool he needs to penetrate deeper - a pair of novelty x-ray specs - and the Kid comes to believe he can see through metal, clothing, skin - to the center of the universe itself, where he imagines something monstrous growing.

It's the dawn of the 1970s, and everything is changing. Enter "The Kid", a panic-prone, hyper-imaginative boy whose life changes drastically when his father brings home an astronaut white El Camino. His birthday arms him with a pair of novelty X-Ray Specs - and as the Camino muscles them through a decade of economic and cultural turmoil, the Kid comes to believe he can see through metal, clothing, skin - to the center of the universe itself, where he imagines something monstrous.

Kichu Shoishob is based on Humayun Ahmed's past experience from true life events.

The Magnificent Jumbalia Kornwell, Change Has Come is one in a series of imaginative literary works supported by the interesting and entertaining ideas of the life journey of Jumbalia Kornwell. It tells of a young Kornwell before his long and rewarding career as a missionary. Most listeners will find something in the story that will make them say, "Yeah, I could do something like that; Boo-Shay-Moe-Fray, sounds like something a Supernova would say."