18 books like A Painted House
The Dark Half
The Dark Half is a horror novel by American writer Stephen King, published in 1989. Publishers Weekly listed The Dark Half as the second best-selling book of 1989 behind Tom Clancy's Clear and Present Danger. The novel was adapted into a feature film of the same name in 1993.
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A Student of Weather
A Student of Weather is the brilliant first novel by acclaimed storywriter, Elizabeth Hay. It tells the story of the rivalry between two contrasting sisters and of a stranger who changes both of their lives forever. Spanning thirty years, it opens in the Prairie Dust Bowl of the 1930s and, later, in the decades following the war, moves back and forth between Ottawa and New York City.
Maurice…
Shares: Rural families, Farm life, Bildungsromans
World's fair
Recalls a certain New York City boyhood in the 1930s, through the eyes of the child himself and then him as an adult trying to reconstruct the past.
Shares: Boys, Bildungsromans
The Neon Bible
The first novel by the Pulizer Prize-winning author of A Confederacy Of Dunces. David is a young boy growing up in a small Southern town in the 1940s. From his porch, David can see the whole valley, including the neon Bible that lights up the sky, emblem of the God-fearing folk who snub his family because Poppa can't afford the church dues.
Shares: Boys, Bildungsromans
His Whole Life
1 volume ; 20 cm
Shares: Boys, Bildungsromans
Bicycle days
When Alec Stern arrives in Japan, he discovers a land of opportunity. For only in Tokyo could an impressionable young man fresh out of college find, in one stroke, a new job, a new family, and a society that lavishes attention on Japanese-speaking gaijin. Yet, even as Alec claims a place in this new world, he is haunted by memories of the one he left behind—a world once infinitely secure but…
Shares: Boys, Bildungsromans
Dandelion Wine
The summer of '28 was a vintage season for a growing boy. A summer of green apple trees, mowed lawns, and new sneakers. Of half-burnt firecrackers, of gathering dandelions, of Grandma's belly-busting dinner. It was a summer of sorrows and marvels and gold-fuzzed bees. A magical, timeless summer in the life of a twelve-year-old boy named Douglas Spaulding—remembered forever by the incomparable Ray…
Shares: Boys, Bildungsromans
Last Days of Summer Updated Ed
From Goodreads:
The hilarious and heart–warming story about a down–and–out kid who finds inspiration in his favourite baseball hero.
In Brooklyn, 1940, a wisecracking, baseball loving twelve–year–old boy, Joey Margolis, is in desperate need of a hero. His rich father has recently divorced his mother, leaving her all but penniless, and she is forced to move herself and her son to an Italian…
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About a Boy
Nick Hornby's second bestselling novel is about sex, manliness and fatherhood. Will is thirty-six, comfortable and child-free. And he's discovered a brilliant new way of meeting women - through single-parent groups. Marcus is twelve and a little bitnerdish: he's got the kind of mother who made him listen to Joni Mitchell rather than Nirvana. Perhaps they can help each other out a little bit, and…
Shares: Boys, Ficción
Wish You Well
Precocious 12-year-old Louisa Mae Cardinal lives inthe hectic New York City of 1940 with her family.Then tragedy strikes--and Lou and her younger brother,Oz, must go with their invalid mother to live on theirgreat-grandmother's farm in the Virginia mountains.Suddenly Lou finds herself coming of age in a newlandscape, making her first true friend, and experiencingadventures tragic, comic, and…
Shares: Farm life, Bildungsromans
Great Expectations
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…
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Jim the boy
A fatherless ten-year-old boy comes of age in a Depression-era, southern farming community in this charming and humorous debut novel.A New York Times Notable Book of the Year"Rich and satisfying . . . A novel that perfectly captures the innocence and confusion and wonder of childhood." —Chicago TribuneHailed as one of those rare works with the power to enchant readers of all ages, this luminous…
Shares: Boys, Bildungsromans
Boy Swallows Universe
Raw, whimsical, existential, heartbreaking, modern mythology
Shares: Boys, Bildungsromans
A fine dark line
It is the summer of 1958 in Dewmont, Texas, a town the great American postwar boom passed by. The kids listen idly to rockabilly on the radio and waste their weekends at the Dairy Queen. And an undetected menace simmers under the heat that clings to the skin like molasses... For thirteen-year-old Stanley Mitchell, the end of innocence comes with his discovery of the mysterious long-ago demise of…
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Brewster
It is 1968, and 16-year-old Jon and his friends form a tight friendship in which they find in each other everything they lack at home and plot to leave their dead-end town. The plot contains pervasive profanity, sexual situations, and graphic violence.
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The Ocean at the End of the Lane
A middle-aged man returns to his childhood home to attend a funeral. Although the house he lived in is long gone, he is drawn to the farm at the end of the road, where, when he was seven, he encountered a most remarkable girl, Lettie Hempstock, and her mother and grandmother. He hasn't thought of Lettie in decades, and yet as he sits by the pond (a pond that she'd claimed was an ocean) behind the…
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Out of the night that covers me
In Bainbridge, Alabama, eight-year-old John Gallatin McMillan III has been the center of his mother's world, cloistered and pampered, until she unexpectedly dies. Taken away by his one remaining relative, his mother's sister, John soon learns that the new home awaiting him in Lower Peach Tree is a run-down tenant farm in the heart of the Alabama Black Belt. There he is thrust into a life alien to…
Shares: Boys, Bildungsromans
Empire of the Sun
A fictionalized account of the author's experiences as a boy in Shanghai, China, during the Second World War, and in Lunghua C.A.C. (Civilian Assembly Centre), where he was interned from 1942 to 1945.
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