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The Fires of Spring

James A. Michener · back to the book

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24 books with the same feel

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The Eternal Wonder

Pearl S. Buck · 288 pages

"The Eternal Wonder tells the coming-of-age story of Randolph Colfax (Rann for short), an extraordinarily gifted young man whose search for meaning and purpose leads him to New York, England, Paris, a mission patrolling the DMZ in Korea that will change his life forever--and, ultimately, to love. Rann falls for the beautiful and equally brilliant Stephanie Kung, who lives in Paris with her Chinese

BildungsromanComing of AgeSelf-DiscoveryLiterary Fiction
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This Side of Paradise

F. Scott Fitzgerald · 256 pages

This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald's romantic and witty first novel, was written when the author was only twenty-three years old. This semi-autobiographical story of the handsome, indulged, and idealistic Princeton student Amory Blaine received critical raves and catapulted Fitzgerald to instant fame. Now, readers can enjoy the newly edited, authorized version of this early classic of the

BildungsromanComing of AgeSelf-DiscoveryLiterary Fiction
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Metroland

Julian Barnes · 224 pages

BildungsromanComing of AgeSelf-DiscoveryLiterary Fiction
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Of Human Bondage

W. Somerset Maugham · 582 pages

Of Human Bondage is a moving exploration of loneliness, obsessive love, and a young man's search for meaning and direction in life. Written in the third person, it tells the story of Philip Carey, a self-conscious orphan with a club-foot who learns medicine. Not only is this a significant work in the Bildungsroman tradition, but its largely autobiographical basis gives it a special interest in vie

BildungsromanComing of AgeSelf-DiscoveryLiterary Fiction
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The Marriage Plot

Jeffrey Eugenides · 406 pages

The story concerns three college friends from Brown University—Madeleine, Leonard, and Mitchell—beginning in their senior year, 1982, and follows them during their first year post-graduation.

BildungsromanComing of AgeSelf-DiscoveryCharacter-Driven
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A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

James Joyce · 228 pages

Stephen Dedalus grows up in Dublin, feeling different from the other boys. His childhood and adolescence are shaped by bullying, his father's weaknesses and the growing realization that in order to make his way in the world he must reject a conventional life and boecome an artist. Penguin Popular Classics are the perfect introduction to the world-famous Penguin Classics series — which encompass

BildungsromanComing of AgeSelf-DiscoveryLiterary Fiction
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Great Expectations

Charles Dickens · 469 pages

Great Expectations is the thirteenth novel by Charles Dickens and his penultimate completed novel. It depicts the education of an orphan nicknamed Pip (the book is a bildungsroman; a coming-of-age story). It is Dickens' second novel, after David Copperfield, to be fully narrated in the first person. The novel was first published as a serial in Dickens's weekly periodical All the Year Round, from 1

BildungsromanComing of AgeSelf-DiscoveryLiterary Fiction
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The Room on the Roof

Ruskin Bond · 160 pages

BildungsromanComing of AgeSelf-DiscoveryLiterary Fiction
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Prep

Curtis Sittenfeld · 427 pages

Curtis Sittenfeld's debut novel, Prep, is an insightful, achingly funny coming-of-age story as well as a brilliant dissection of class, race, and gender in a hothouse of adolescent angst and ambition.Lee Fiora is an intelligent, observant fourteen-year-old when her father drops her off in front of her dorm at the prestigious Ault School in Massachusetts. She leaves her animated, affectionate famil

BildungsromanComing of AgeSelf-DiscoveryCharacter-Driven
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The Whisper of the River

Ferrol Sams · 528 pages

BildungsromanComing of AgeSelf-DiscoveryCharacter-Driven
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The Beautiful Room Is Empty

Edmund White · 199 pages

When the narrator of White's poised yet scalding autobiographical novel first embarks on his sexual odyssey, it is the 1950s, and America is "a big gray country of families on drowsy holiday." That country has no room for a scholarly teenager with guilty but insatiable stirrings toward other men. Moving from a Midwestern college to the Stonewall Tavern on the night of the first gay uprising--and p

BildungsromanComing of AgeSelf-DiscoveryCharacter-Driven
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Black Swan Green

David Mitchell · 344 pages

A novel. From hardcover: "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. A world of Kissingeresque realpolitik enacted in boys’ games on a frozen l

BildungsromanComing of AgeSelf-DiscoveryLiterary Fiction
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The Goldfinch

Donna Tartt · 817 pages

"The Goldfinch is a rarity that comes along perhaps half a dozen times per decade, a smartly written literary novel that connects with the heart as well as the mind....Donna Tartt has delivered an extraordinary work of fiction."--Stephen King, The New York Times Book Review Composed with the skills of a master, The Goldfinch is a haunted odyssey through present day America and a drama of enthra

BildungsromanComing of AgeSelf-DiscoveryLiterary Fiction
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An Unfinished Season

Ward Just · 256 pages

BildungsromanComing of AgeCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Looking for Alaska

John Green · 262 pages

Before. Miles “Pudge” Halter is done with his safe life at home. His whole life has been one big non-event, and his obsession with famous last words has only made him crave “the Great Perhaps” even more (Francois Rabelais, poet). He heads off to the sometimes crazy and anything-but-boring world of Culver Creek Boarding School, and his life becomes the opposite of safe. Because down the hall is Ala

BildungsromanComing of AgeSelf-DiscoveryCharacter-Driven
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The Bell Jar

Sylvia Plath · 258 pages

The Bell Jar is a classic of American literature, with over two million copies sold in this country. This extraordinary work chronicles the crack-up of Esther Greenwood: brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, successful - but slowly going under, and maybe for the last time. Step by careful step, Sylvia Plath takes us with Esther through a painful month in New York as a contest-winning junior

BildungsromanComing of AgeSelf-DiscoveryLiterary Fiction
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The Catcher in the Rye

Jerome David Salinger · 277 pages

With the author's recent passing, the classic novel about young Holden Caulfield's disillusionment with the adult world and its phoniness will only rise in popularity--and controversy, since it is a favorite target of censors, who often cite profan

BildungsromanComing of AgeSelf-DiscoveryLiterary Fiction
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Siddhartha

Hermann Hesse · 130 pages

Hermann Hesse wrote Siddhartha after he traveled to India in the 1910s. It tells the story of a young boy who travels the country in a quest for spiritual enlightenment in the time of Guatama Buddha. It is a compact, lyrical work, which reads like an allegory about the finding of wisdom.

BildungsromanComing of AgeLiterary FictionSelf-Discovery
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Purple Hibiscus

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie · 307 pages

“One of the most vital and original novelists of her generation.” —Larissa MacFarquhar, The New Yorker From the bestselling author of Americanah and We Should All Be Feminists Fifteen-year-old Kambili and her older brother Jaja lead a privileged life in Enugu, Nigeria. They live in a beautiful house, with a caring family, and attend an exclusive missionary school. They're completely shielded fro

BildungsromanComing of AgeSelf-DiscoveryLiterary Fiction
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Tipping the Velvet

Sarah Waters · 480 pages

Nan King, an oyster girl, is captivated by the music hall phenomenon Kitty Butler, a male impersonator extraordinaire treading the boards in Canterbury. Through a friend at the box office, Nan manages to visit all her shows and finally meet her heroine. Soon after, she becomes Kitty's dresser and the two head for the bright lights of Leicester Square where they begin a glittering career as music-h

BildungsromanComing of AgeSelf-DiscoveryCharacter-Driven
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The Learning Tree

Gordon Parks · 303 pages

Autobiographical novel about a boy entering his teens in a racially segregated Kansas town in the 1920s.

BildungsromanComing of AgeCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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In One Person

John Irving · 448 pages

A New York Times bestselling novel of desire, secrecy, and sexual identity, In One Person is a story of unfulfilled love—tormented, funny, and affecting—and an impassioned embrace of our sexual differences. Billy, the bisexual narrator and main character of In One Person, tells the tragicomic story (lasting more than half a century) of his life as a "sexual suspect," a phrase first used by John Ir

BildungsromanComing of AgeLiterary FictionCharacter-Driven
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In the Castle of My Skin

George Lamming · 313 pages

George Lamming's "In the Castle of My Skin" skilfully depicts the Barbadian psyche. Set against the backdrop of the 1930s riots which helped to pave the way for Independence and the modern Barbados, through the eyes of a young boy, Lamming portrays the social, racial, political and urban struggles with which Barbados continues to grapple even with some thirty-three years of Political Independence

BildungsromanComing of AgeCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Breath

Tim Winton · 217 pages

When a paramedic on a late shift comes across a dead teenager, it brings back a rush of adolescent memories. Breath charts the stories of Piklet and Loonie as they push the boundaries as boys often do, pitting themselves against Western Australia's biggest surf. A story of isolation, lust, salt and growing up.

BildungsromanComing of AgeLiterary FictionCharacter-Driven

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