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The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea

Randolph Stow · back to the book

What’s in it

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24 books with the same feel

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❤️

The House on Mango Street

Sandra Cisneros · 110 pages

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A coming-of-age classic, acclaimed by critics, beloved by readers of all ages, taught in schools and universities alike, and translated around the world—from the winner of the 2019 PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature. The House on Mango Street is the remarkable story of Esperanza Cordero, a young Latina girl growing up in Chicago, inventing for he

BildungsromanChild NarratorComing of AgeLyrical Prose
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Childhood

Leo Tolstoy · 120 pages

On the 12th of August, 18 - (just three days after my tenth birthday, when I had been given such wonderful presents), I was awakened at seven o'clock in the morning by Karl Ivanitch slapping the wall close to my head with a fly-flap made of sugar paper and a stick. He did this so roughly that he hit the image of my patron saint suspended to the oaken back of my bed, and the dead fly fell down on m

BildungsromanChild NarratorComing of AgeNostalgic
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Eli the Good

Silas House

Bicentennial fireworks burn the sky. Bob Seger growls from a transistor radio. And down by the river, girls line up on lawn chairs in pursuit of the perfect tan. Yet for ten-year-old Eli Book, the summer of 1976 will go down as the one that threatened to tear his family apart. There is his beautiful and distant mother; his traumatized Vietnam vet dad; his wild and confused sister; his former war-p

BildungsromanComing of AgeChild NarratorNostalgic
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To Kill a Mockingbird

Harper Lee · 309 pages

One of the best-loved stories of all time, To Kill a Mockingbird has been translated into more than 40 languages, sold more than 30 million copies worldwide, served as the basis for an enormously popular motion picture, and voted one of the best novels of the 20th century by librarians across the United States. A gripping, heart-wrenching, and wholly remarkable tale of coming-of-age in a South poi

BildungsromanComing of AgeNostalgicChild Narrator
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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 AgeChild NarratorLyrical Prose
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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 AgeNostalgicLyrical Prose
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Anita and Me

Meera Syal · 336 pages

BildungsromanComing of AgeChild NarratorNostalgic
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We the Animals

Justin Torres · 144 pages

"An exquisite, blistering debut novel. Three brothers tear their way through childhood-- smashing tomatoes all over each other, building kites from trash, hiding out when their parents do battle, tiptoeing around the house as their mother sleeps off her graveyard shift. Paps and Ma are from Brooklyn--he's Puerto Rican, she's white--and their love is a serious, dangerous thing that makes and unmake

BildungsromanComing of AgeChild NarratorLyrical Prose
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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 AgeNostalgicLiterary Fiction
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Swallowing Mercury

Wioletta Greg, Wioletta Grzegorzewska · 160 pages

BildungsromanComing of AgeChild NarratorLyrical Prose
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Fig

Sarah Elizabeth Schantz · 349 pages

In 1994, Fig looks back on her life and relates her experiences, from age six to nineteen, as she desperately tries to save her mother from schizophrenia while her own mental health and relationships deteriorate.

BildungsromanComing of AgeChild NarratorLyrical Prose
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Frankie and Stankie

Barbara Trapido · 336 pages

Dinah and her sister Lisa are growing up in South Africa in the fifties. It is at school that Dinah first learns about racism. As we follow Dinah from childhood, through adolescence and marriage, to voluntary exile in London, we get a vivid glimpse of oneof the darker passages of 20th century history.

BildungsromanComing of AgeChild NarratorNostalgic
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Boy's Life

Robert McCammon · 541 pages

"Zephyr, Alabama, has been an idyllic home for eleven-year-old Cory Mackenson...a place where monsters swim in the belly of the river, and friends are forever. Then, on a cold spring morning in 1964, as Cory accompanies his father on his milk route, they see a car plunge into a lake some say is bottomless." -- Back cover.

BildungsromanChild NarratorComing of AgeNostalgic
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The Room on the Roof

Ruskin Bond · 160 pages

BildungsromanNostalgicComing of AgeLyrical Prose
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The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Mark Twain · 330 pages

BildungsromanComing of AgeChild NarratorNostalgic
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Bless Me, Ultima

Rudolfo Anaya · 252 pages

Ultima, a curandera, one who cures with herbs and magic, comes to Antonio Marez's New Mexico family when he is six years old, and she helps him discover himself in the magical secrets of the pagan past.

BildungsromanChild NarratorComing of AgeLyrical Prose
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A Separate Peace

John Knowles · 196 pages

Gene Forrester looks back fifteen years to a World War II year in which he and his best friend were roommates in a New hampshire boarding school.

BildungsromanNostalgicComing of AgeLiterary Fiction
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Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog

Dylan Thomas · 160 pages

A series of autobiographical sketches show Thomas' great humor, exuberance and verbal magic.

BildungsromanNostalgicComing of AgeLyrical Prose
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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 AgeNostalgicChild Narrator
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When God Was a Rabbit

Sarah Winman · 325 pages

BildungsromanComing of AgeChild NarratorNostalgic
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Dreams of My Russian Summers

Andrei Makine · 241 pages

A Frenchwoman's account of Russia before and after the 1917 revolution. She is Charlotte who came as a nurse in World War I and married a Russian lawyer. The story is told by her grandson who listened to her tales, fascinated by her power of observation.

BildungsromanComing of AgeNostalgicLiterary Fiction
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Tell the Wolves I'm Home

Carol Rifka Brunt · 384 pages

It is 1987, and only one person has ever truly understood fourteen-year-old June Elbus -- her uncle, the renowned painter Finn Weiss. Shy at school and distant from her older sister, June can only be herself in Finn's company; he is her godfather, confidant, and best friend. So when he dies, far too young, of a mysterious illness her mother can barely speak about, June's world is turned upside d

BildungsromanComing of AgeLiterary FictionNostalgic
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Pather panchali: Song of the road

Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay · 316 pages

Child NarratorComing of AgeNostalgicLyrical Prose
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The Cat's Table

Michael Ondaatje · 296 pages

In the early 1950s, an eleven-year-old boy in Colombo boards a ship bound for England. At mealtimes he is seated at the "cat's table"--as far from the Captain's Table as can be--with a ragtag group of "insignificant" adults and two other boys, Cassius and Ramadhin. As the ship makes its way across the Indian Ocean, through the Suez Canal, into the Mediterranean, the boys tumble from one adventure

Coming of AgeChild NarratorNostalgicLyrical Prose

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