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Self

Yann Martel · back to the book

What’s in it

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24 books with the same feel

Include books by the same author
❤️

Middlesex

Jeffrey Eugenides · 544 pages

A unique coming of age story. While the main character in this novel is dealing with gender identity issues the main focus of this brilliantly written story is the confusion we all face as we grow into the person we were meant to be. The reader finds himself identifying with the main character's experiences. This is a brilliantly written story. The prose is honest in a way that few authors dare t

Gender IdentityIdentity FormationBildungsromanSelf-Discovery
❤️

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

Gender IdentityIdentity FormationBildungsromanLiterary Fiction
❤️

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

Identity FormationBildungsromanGender IdentitySelf-Discovery
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Sacred Country

Rose Tremain · 384 pages

Gender IdentityIdentity FormationBildungsromanLiterary Fiction
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Mission Child

Maureen F. McHugh · 385 pages

A stunning and provocative spiritual odyssey reminiscent of the best work of Margaret Atwood and Ursula K. Le Guin, MISSION CHILD is a powerful fable, a stirring adventure, and a profoundly moving portrait of a lost woman in search of an identity as she walks the narrow fault line dividing female and male, child and adult, dark reality and illuminated dream.

Gender IdentityIdentity FormationSelf-DiscoveryLGBTQ+ Protagonist
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Alex As Well

Alyssa Brugman · 224 pages

Raised as a boy, fourteen-year-old Alex, who has male and female sexual body parts, rejects the hormonal medications prescribed by his mother and decides to live as a girl.

Gender IdentityIdentity FormationSelf-DiscoveryLGBTQ+ Protagonist
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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

Gender IdentityBildungsromanSelf-DiscoveryFirst Person Narrator
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Misfortune

Wesley Stace · 544 pages

When Lord Geoffroy Loveall finds an abandoned baby, he treats the child as his daughter, despite the male gender of the child, who grows up desperately conflicted in the richest home in nineteenth-century England.

Gender IdentityIdentity FormationSelf-DiscoveryLGBTQ+ Protagonist
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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

Identity FormationBildungsromanSelf-DiscoveryLiterary Fiction
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Every Day

David Levithan · 330 pages

Every morning A wakes in a different person's body, in a different person's life, learning over the years to never get too attached, until he wakes up in the body of Justin and falls in love with Justin's girlfriend, Rhiannon.

Gender IdentityIdentity FormationSelf-DiscoveryFirst Person Narrator
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Luna

Julie Anne Peters · 248 pages

Regan's brother Liam can't stand the person he is during the day. Like the moon from whom Liam has chosen his female namesake, his true self, Luna, only reveals herself at night. In the secrecy of his basement bedroom Liam transforms himself into the beautiful girl he longs to be, with help from his sister's clothes and makeup. Now, everything is about to change-Luna is preparing to emerge from he

Gender IdentityIdentity FormationSelf-DiscoveryFirst Person Narrator
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Stone Butch Blues

Leslie Feinberg · 366 pages

Stone Butch Blues is a historical fiction novel written by Leslie Feinberg about life as a butch lesbian in 1970s America. While fictional, the work also takes inspiration from Feinberg's own life, and she describes it as her "call to action."

Gender IdentitySelf-DiscoveryLiterary FictionFirst Person Narrator
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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

BildungsromanIdentity FormationSelf-DiscoveryLiterary Fiction
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Invisible Monsters

Chuck Palahniuk · 304 pages

Shannon McFarland, splendida top model, dalla vita ha avuto tutto quello che si può desiderare: l'amore, la carriera, un'amicizia sincera. La sua esistenza viene però sconvolta quando, mentre sta guidando la sua auto, una misteriosa fucilata la raggiunge al volto, lasciandola orrendamente sfigurata e incapace di parlare. E da affascinante centro di attrazione Shannon si ritrova a essere un mostro

Gender IdentityIdentity FormationLiterary FictionLGBTQ+ Protagonist
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How to Build a Girl

Caitlin Moran · 341 pages

After she shames herself on local television, Johanna Morgan reinvents herself as Dolly Wilde--a fast-talking, hard-drinking Gothic hero--until two years later, while eviscerating bands as a music critic, she realizes she's built Dolly with a fatal flaw.

Identity FormationBildungsromanSelf-DiscoveryFirst Person Narrator
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Drew

T. Cooper, Allison Glock · 285 pages

"It is the eve of Ethan Miller's freshman year. He's psyched to be in high school (finally). Until the next morning. When he awakens as a girl. Ethan is a "Changer," one of a little-known race of humans who live out each of their years of high school as someone new. Ethan must now navigate the treacherous waters of ninth grade as Drew Bohner, a petite blonde with an unfortunate last name." - Provi

Gender IdentityIdentity FormationSelf-DiscoveryFirst Person Narrator
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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

Identity FormationBildungsromanSelf-DiscoveryLiterary Fiction
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Metroland

Julian Barnes · 224 pages

BildungsromanIdentity FormationSelf-DiscoveryLiterary Fiction
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I am J

Cris Beam · 326 pages

J, who feels like a boy mistakenly born as a girl, runs away from his best friend who has rejected him and the parents he thinks do not understand him when he finally decides that it is time to be who he really is.

Gender IdentityIdentity FormationSelf-DiscoveryLGBTQ+ Protagonist
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She's Not There: A Life in Two Genders

Jennifer Finney Boylan · 320 pages

The exuberant memoir of a man named James who became a woman named Jenny. She’s Not There is the story of a person changing genders, the story of a person bearing and finally revealing a complex secret; above all, it is a love story. By turns funny and deeply moving, Jennifer Finney Boylan explores the remarkable territory that lies between men and women, examines changing friendships, and r

Gender IdentityIdentity FormationFirst Person NarratorLGBTQ+ Protagonist
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Demian

Hermann Hesse · 166 pages

A young man awakens to selfhood and to a world of possibilities beyond the conventions of his upbringing in Nobel Prize winner Hermann Hesse’s beloved novel Demian. Emil Sinclair is a quiet boy drawn into a forbidden yet seductive realm of petty crime and defiance. His guide is his precocious, mysterious classmate Max Demian, who provokes in Emil a search for self-discovery and spiritual fulfillme

Identity FormationBildungsromanSelf-DiscoveryLiterary Fiction
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Freakboy

Kristin Elizabeth Clark · 437 pages

Brendan Chase is an athlete, a star student, and boyfriend to the perfect girlfriend, Vanessa. She has silky brown hair, soft skin, and gentle curves -- everything that Brendan could ever want. Except that Brendan wants much more. He doesn't just want to be with her; he wants to be like her. At least sometimes he does. Is there a name for people like him? Guys who maybe sometimes want to be girls?

Gender IdentityIdentity FormationSelf-DiscoveryLGBTQ+ Protagonist
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Being Emily

Rachel Gold · 264 pages

They say whoever you are it's okay, you were born that way. Those words don't comfort Emily because she was born Christopher and her insides know that her outsides are all wrong.

Gender IdentityIdentity FormationSelf-DiscoveryLGBTQ+ Protagonist
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Aurora Leigh

Elizabeth Barrett Browning · 403 pages

Aurora Leigh is the foremost example of the mid-nineteenth-century poem of contemporary life. This verse-novel is a richly detailed representation of the early Victorian age. The social panorama extends from the slums of London, through the literary world, to the upper classes and a number of superb satiric portraits: an aunt with rigidly conventional notions of female education; Romney Leigh, th

BildungsromanIdentity FormationLiterary FictionFirst Person Narrator

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