18 books like Boy Swallows Universe
Demi-gods
"Atmospheric and lushly detailed, Demi-Gods captures the wonder and menace of adolescence in ways both unsettling and profound." --Christina Baker Kline, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Orphan Train and A Piece of the World "A brutally beautiful coming-of-age story that sings with language as lovely, wild, and full of ominous longing as the young woman at its center." --Robin Wasserman,…
Shares: Dysfunctional families, Bildungsromans
The Faithless
Don't miss NO REGRET, the brand new novel from Martina Cole. Coming October 2025. With family, there's a dangerous line between love and hate... Reaching the darkest corners of family life, THE FAITHLESS by the 'undisputed queen of crime writing' (Guardian) and Sunday Times No.1 bestseller Martina Cole is an unputdownable novel about a deadly ambition that trumps family loyalty... Cynthia Tailor…
Shares: Dysfunctional families, Families
His Whole Life
1 volume ; 20 cm
Shares: Boys, Bildungsromans, Families
Faces
"Just before Danny Cadogan's fourteenth birthday, his father leaves. Alone, his wife and children face the wrath of the men sent to collect his gambling debt. Now, Danny is determined to protect his mother, brother and sister, and is set on making his way in a violent world. He becomes a Face - the most feared Face in the Smoke. Out for all he can get. At any cost. But Danny also rules his wife,…
Shares: Dysfunctional families, Criminals, Families
Big Little Lies
Pirriwee Public is a beautiful little beachside primary school where children are taught that ‘sharing is caring.’ So how has the annual School Trivia Night ended in full-blown riot? Sirens are wailing. People are screaming. The principal is mortified.
And one parent is dead.
Was it a murder, a tragic accident or just good parents gone bad? As the parents at Pirriwee Public are about to discover,…
Shares: Suburbs, Families, Friendship
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
Irma Voth
The stifling, reclusive life of nineteen-year-old Irma Voth, recently married and more recently deserted, is turned on its head when a film crew moves in to make a movie about the strict religious community in which she and her family live.
Shares: Dysfunctional families, Bildungsromans, Families
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
All the ugly and wonderful things
"As the daughter of a drug dealer, Wavy knows not to trust people, not even her own parents. It's safer to keep her mouth shut and stay out of sight. Struggling to raise her little brother, Donal, eight-year-old Wavy is the only responsible adult around. Obsessed with the constellations, she finds peace in the starry night sky above the fields behind her house, until one night her star gazing…
Shares: Dysfunctional families, Bildungsromans
The bent twig
Unlike other young women of her generation, who were "bred up from childhood to sit behind tea-tables and say the right things to tea-drinkers," Sylvia Marshall - the "twig" of this novel - was reared to think for herself and to trust her own instincts and experience. This, coupled with her passionate temperament, makes Sylvia a compelling figure as she resists efforts to mold her with every…
Shares: Bildungsromans, Families
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
The porcupine of truth
Seventeen-year-old Carson Speier is bored of Billings, Montana, and resentful that he has to help his mother take care of his father, a dying alcoholic whom he has not seen in fourteen years--but then he meets Aisha, a beautiful African American girl who has run away from her own difficult family, and together they embark on a journey of discovery that may help them both come to terms with their…
Shares: Dysfunctional families, Bildungsromans, Friendship
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…
Shares: Boys, Bildungsromans, Friendship
Fall On Your Knees:A Novel
The story of a jinxed family, a catalog of rape, incest and death. James Piper abuses his daughter, atones by sending her to New York to study singing while he goes to war, she returns pregnant, dies in childbirth when her mother opens her to save her twins. One of the twins dies, mother commits suicide, the second twin contracts polio while being baptized in a creek by an aunt, the aunt is raped…
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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
All the conspirators
A timeless story of decaying middle-class English life after wwI and the generation that tried to escape its values
Christopher Isherwood was only twenty-one when he began his first novel, All the Conspirators. in his introduction to the American edition, Isherwood explains: “All the Conspirators records a minor engagement in what Shelley calls ‘the great war between the old and young.’ And what…
Shares: Bildungsromans, Families
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…
Shares: Boys, Bildungsromans
A Painted House
Using his own childhood for inspiration (and leaving the lawyers behind), bestselling author John Grisham sets A Painted House in 1950s rural Arkansas. During harvest time, together with hired Mexicans and hill people, seven-year-old Luke Chandler picks cotton on his family's rented 80 acres. But racial tension, a forbidden love affair, and murder cause Luke to grow up before he's ready.
Shares: Boys, Bildungsromans