Showing results by publisher "Fourth Estate" in Coming of Age

Chiamaka is a Nigerian travel writer living in America. Alone in the midst of the pandemic, she recalls her past lovers and grapples with her choices and regrets. Zikora, her best friend, is a lawyer who has been successful at everything until she must turn to the person she thought she needed least. Omelogor, Chiamaka’s bold, outspoken cousin, is a financial powerhouse in Nigeria who begins to question how well she knows herself. And Kadiatou, Chiamaka’s housekeeper, is proudly raising her daughter in America – but faces an unthinkable hardship that threatens all she has worked to achieve.

Bound together by a single ancient text, the unforgettable characters of Cloud Cuckoo Land are dreamers and outsiders figuring out the world around them: 13-year-old Anna and Omeir, an orphaned seamstress and a cursed boy, on opposite sides of the formidable city walls during the 1453 siege of Constantinople; teenage idealist Seymour and octogenarian Zeno in an attack on a public library in present-day Idaho; and Konstance, decades from now, who turns to the oldest stories to guide her community in peril.

Vanessa Wye was 15 years old when she first had sex with her English teacher. She is now 32 and the teacher, Jacob Strane, has just been accused of sexual abuse by another former student of his. Vanessa is horrified by this news, because she is quite certain that the relationship she had with Strane wasn’t abuse. It was love. She’s sure of that. But now, in 2017, in the midst of allegations against powerful men, she is being asked to redefine the great love story of her life - her great sexual awakening - as rape.

This is a story of a London you won’t find in any guidebooks. This is a story about what it’s like to exist in the moment, about boys too eager to become men, growing up in the hidden war zones of big cities - and the girls trying to make it their own way. This is a story of reputations made and lost, of violence and vengeance - and never counting the cost. This is a story of concrete towers and blank-eyed windows, of endless nights in police stations and prison cells, of brotherhood and betrayal.

On the eve of Donald Trump’s inauguration, a young woman snoops through her boyfriend’s phone and makes a startling discovery: he’s an anonymous internet conspiracy theorist, and a popular one at that. Already fluent in internet fakery, irony and outrage, she’s not exactly shocked by the revelation. But this is only the first in a series of bizarre twists that expose a world whose truths are shaped by online lies. Suddenly left with no reason to stay in New York—or be anywhere in particular—she flees to Berlin....

Marguerite Demers is 24 when she leaves Paris for the sleepy southern village of Saint-Sulpice, to take up a job as a live-in nurse. Her charge is Jerome Lanvier, once one of the most powerful men in the village, and now dying alone in his large and secluded house, surrounded by rambling gardens. Manipulative and tyrannical, Jerome has scared away all his previous nurses.

It is the summer of 1969 and Rome is awash with glamour and intrigue. Teddy Huntley Carlyle is fresh off a plane from Texas with a new husband in tow and a new life on the horizon. After some wayward years of bad men and bad decisions, she’s promised herself a fresh start. In Rome, Teddy will be good. She will wear the right clothes and the perfect lipstick and she will charm her husband’s colleagues at the Embassy.

Working for one of the most powerful publishers in the country, Rose spends her days doing PR for glossy magazines. There are tedious spreadsheets, fashion divas, and many A-list parties. It’s at one of those parties where she meets Milo Jax, the world-famous, globally adored, British pop sensation. An unlikely flirtation turns into an even more unlikely evening and then Rose wakes up, unable to piece it all together. What happens next changes everything.

Maggie’s marriage has ended just 608 days after it started, but she’s fine—she’s doing really good, actually. Sure, she’s alone for the first time in her life, can’t afford her rent and her obscure PhD is going nowhere...but at the age of twenty-nine, Maggie is determined to embrace her new status as a Surprisingly Young Divorcée™. Soon she’s taking up ‘sadness hobbies’ and getting back out there, sex-wise, oversharing in the group chat and drinking with her high-intensity new divorced friend Amy.

Joe Coppock squints at the world with his lazy eye. He reads his comics, collects birds' eggs and treasures his marbles, particularly his prized dobbers. When Treacle Walker appears off the Cheshire moor one day - a wanderer, a healer - an unlikely friendship is forged and the young boy is introduced to a world he could never have imagined.

Fabienne is dead. Her childhood best friend, Agnès, receives the news in America, far from the French countryside where the two girls were raised—the place that Fabienne helped Agnès escape ten years ago. Now, Agnès is free to tell her story. As children in a backwater town, they’d built a private world, invisible to everyone but themselves—until Fabienne hatched the plan that would change everything, launching Agnès on an epic trajectory through fame, fortune and terrible loss.

An unnamed young trans woman grows up in a working-class suburb that has no place for her. She discovers community and kinship in downtown Madrid, amid a dazzling party scene animated by charming junkies, glamorous pop divas, and fallen angels. With each step she takes forward in the city, she finds herself confronted by an antagonism she does not yet know how to counter. In this thrilling and yet often frightening place each decision can have the highest of stakes and yet she knows that only she can forge a path forward to the life she truly wants to live.

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.

The bonds of family are tested in the wake of a profound tragedy, providing a look at the darker side of our society. Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars. is a gripping examination of contemporary America through the prism of a family tragedy: when a powerful parent dies, each of his adult children reacts in startling and unexpected ways and his grieving widow in the most surprising way of all.

Eley Williams returns with a subversive and essential collection of short stories exploring the nature of relationships both intimate and transient – from the easy gamesmanship of contagious yawns to the horror of a smile fixed for just a second too long. Whether jostling for attention or ducking to evade it, her characters seek connections not only with each other but also to versions of themselves.

Ten-year-old Margaret hides beneath a blackberry bush in her family’s lush backyard while her brother hunts for her in a game of flashlight tag. Hers is a childhood of sunlit swimming pools, Saturday morning pancakes and a devoted best friend, but her family life requires careful prudence. Her mother can be as brittle as she can be loving, and her father and brother assume familiar, if uncomfortable, models of masculinity. Then late one fateful summer, everything changes. A line is crossed and in the wake of that betrayal the simple pleasures of girlhood slip away.

Dylan Read, the legendary country pop star, has spent fifteen years learning to craft the perfect good girl image. But Dylan is privately haunted by the loss of her best friend Kelsey, who went missing the year before Dylan’s meteoric rise to fame. When Kelsey’s body is found at the bottom of a New England lake where they grew up, Dylan is drawn back to her hometown where she must revisit their ill-fated teenage friendship and reckon with secrets that have stayed hidden for decades…

An unnamed young trans woman grows up in a working class suburb that has no place for her. She discovers community and kinship in downtown Madrid, amid a lively party scene animated by junkies, pop divas, and fallen angels. But with each step she takes forward, she finds herself confronted by a violence she does not yet know how to counter; in this thrilling and yet often terrifying world each choice can truly be a matter of life and death.

Ambitious and hardworking Tracy Flick feels underappreciated and stuck. Her job as a high school assistant principal isn’t the political career she dreamed of as an over-achieving teen, so when the longtime principal abruptly announces his retirement, offering a rare chance of promotion, Tracy is filled with zeal at the prospect of success. But nothing ever comes easily to Tracy Flick, no matter how diligent or qualified she happens to be.

In the wake of first heartbreak, Nur somehow meets his perfect woman. Yasmina is bright, beautiful and, what’s most remarkable, she’s into him too. Before long, they are inseparable. But no relationship is perfect. For Yasmina, the complexities of family and cultural expectation are something she wants to navigate with Nur by her side. For Nur, the pressures of being the ‘good son’ are suffocating, and soon threaten everything he wants for his future with Yasmina. Can he find a way to offer her everything she deserves?