16 books like Anthem of a Reluctant Prophet
Imago bird
"This novel examines the contradictions between the public face and the private experience. Nephew to the prime minister of England, Bert tries to make sense of the grown-up world around him, a colorful crowd of television personalities, politicians, young Trotskyites, pop stars, and eccentric relatives. With the help of his laconic psychoanalyst, Bert questions the relation between exterior and…
Shares: Teenage boys, Bildungsromans
The Deadman's Pedal
It is the early 1970s and for 16-year-old Simon Crimmons there's really not much to do in the Highlands of Scotland. The only local drama and romance is the West Highland Line, so Simon joins up as a train driver. But that summer he is introduced to a world far more glamorous and strange than the railways can provide.
Shares: Teenage boys, Bildungsromans
Bendigo Shafter
Ben Shafter helps his brother, his sister Lorna, and Ethan Sakett found a town in Wyoming while trying to learn more about Native Americans as well as whites.
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The Book of Form and Emptiness
The Book of Form and Emptiness is a novel by American author Ruth Ozeki, published in 2021 by Viking. Ozekis fourth novel, the book won the 2022 Women's Prize for Fiction. The story follows a boy who hears voices from inanimate objects while the narrative explores themes of mental illness and bereavement.
Shares: Teenage 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: City and town life, Bildungsromans
Selection Day
From Aravind Adiga, the bestselling, Booker Prize-winning author of The White Tiger, a dazzling new novel about two brothers in a Mumbai slum who are raised by their obsessive father to become cricket stars, and whose coming-of-age threatens their relationship, future, and sense of themselves. Manjunath Kumar is fourteen and living in a slum in Mumbai. He knows he is good at cricket--if not as…
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Hotel Paradise
1st book in Emma Graham series
Shares: City and town life, Bildungsromans
The Fortress of Solitude
This is the story of two boys, Dylan Ebdus and Mingus Rude. They are friends and neighbors, but because Dylan is white and Mingus is black, their friendship is not simple. This is the story of their Brooklyn neighborhood, which is almost exclusively black despite the first whispers of something that will become known as "gentrification."
This is the story of 1970s America, a time when the most…
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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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Stillwater
In 1938, five towns in western Massachusetts were flooded to create a huge reservoir. In this beautifully rendered novel of coming of age, of loyalty and betrayal, good and evil, and of bravery and an abiding love, Stillwater marks a significant literary step forward for William Weld in what has already emerged as a notable writing career. Fifteen-year-old Jamieson, who lives on a farm with his…
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Middlesex
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…
Shares: City and town life, Bildungsromans
The Catcher in the Rye
Story of Holden Caufield with his idiosyncrasies, penetrating insight, confusion, sensitivity and negativism. Holden, knowing he is to be expelled from school, decides to leave early. He spends three days in New York City and tells the story of what he did and suffered there.
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Ordinary Grace
Looking back at a tragic event that occurred during his thirteenth year, Frank Drum explores how a complicated web of secrets, adultery, and betrayal shattered his Methodist family and their small 1961 Minnesota community.
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The Chosen
It's about two jewish boys from different jewish sects with very differing doctrine. The kids meet in the unlikely circumstance of a baseball game, and a terrible accident, that leads them to be lifelong friends
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The turmoil, a novel
Booth Tarkington grew up in Indianapolis, and attended Princeton University. He set much of his fiction in Indiana. Tarkington was one of the more popular novelists of his time, and in 1921 booksellers rated him in a poll as the most significant contemporary American author.
-Wikipedia entry for Tarkington
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Demian
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…
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