18 books like Roustabout
Miss Marjoribanks
When Dr. Marjoribanks’s wife dies, his teenage daughter makes it her purpose in life “to be a comfort to dear papa.” At least, Lucilla thinks, ten years of such devotion might suffice, by which time she might have begun to “go off.” But beneath this grand intention lies a yet more ambitious plan: to revolutionize the moribund and constricted social life of Carlingford. She is remarkably…
Shares: Young women, 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: Young women, Bildungsromans
Candy
Banned upon its initial publication, the now-classic Candy is a romp of a story about the impossibly sweet Candy Christian, a wide-eyed, luscious, all-American girl. Candy -- a satire of Voltaire's Candide -- chronicles her adventures with mystics, sexual analysts, and everyone she meets when she sets out to experience the world.
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Running
"Running brings together an ensemble of outsiders who get by as "runners"hustlers who sell tourists on low-end accommodations for a small commission and a place to stay. Bridey Sullivan, a young American woman who has fled a peculiar and traumatic upbringing in Washington State, takes up with a queer British couple, the poet Milo Rollack and Eton drop-out Jasper Lethe. Slipping in and out of…
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How the Light Gets In
A powerful debut from an Australian novelist that features one of the most likeable but contrary figures you are likely to meet in contemporary fiction. Lou Connor, a gifted, unhappy sixteen-year-old, is desperate to escape her life of poverty in Sydney. When she is offered an exchange student placement at a school in America it seems as if her dreams will be fulfilled. Her host family has a…
Shares: Young women, Bildungsromans, United States
Judith Paris
Covering the years 1771 to 1822 and set partly in Revolutionary Paris, and partly in romantic Cumbria, Judith Paris is the story of the two very different men who love Walpole's most delightful heroine. Daughter of Francis Herries and Mirabell Starr, Judith was described on publication as "the most delightful of Walpole's heroines." As impetuous, impulsive and passionate as her father, she is…
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Confessions of a Shopaholic, Shopaholic Takes Manhattan, and Shopaholic Ties the Knot (Shopaholic Series, Books 1, 2, & 3)
Meet Becky Bloomwood, America’s favorite shopaholic—a young woman with a big heart, big dreams…and just one little weakness.
Becky has a fabulous flat in London's trendiest neighborhood, a troupe of glamorous socialite friends, and a closet brimming with the season's must-haves. The only trouble is that she can't actually afford it—not any of it.
Her job writing at Successful Savings not only…
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Lili
Derrière le portrait d'une jeune Chinoise dans les années 1980, l'histoire d'une prise de conscience sociale qui aboutit aux événements de la place Tian'anmen en 1989. [SDM].
Shares: Young women, Bildungsromans
Nora, Nora
"Peyton is not ready to share her widowed father with anyone, let alone a barely remembered cousin who just rolled into town, a cousin who smokes cigarettes and drives a pink Thunderbird. However, her father seems to like Nora well enough, and she does make for good conversation at the Losers Club, and prim Aunt Augusta hates her, which raises Nora slightly in Peyton's esteem. Maybe she isn't so…
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Downtown
Set on the cusp of the country's great social movements - youth, women's, peace, and civil rights - in the year before the love turned to anger and the peace to militancy, Downtown is the story of Smoky O'Donnell, her career and her heart.
When Smoky arrives in Atlanta in 1966, after an airless lifetime back in Savannah, she is at once thrilled and chastened by this dazzling, hectic young city…
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Trading Up
A lingerie model whose fame and success have gone to her head, Janey Wilcox becomes involved in a world of too much money and too little ethics where she is forced to reexamine her values to determine how far she is willing to go to succeed.
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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.
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Tea
On a spring day in 1968, eight-year-old Isabel Gold prepares tea for her mother, certain she will drink it and recover from her mysterious sadness. But the tea remains untouched. Not long after, her mother takes her own life. Struggling to understand the ghost her mother left behind, Isabel grows up trying on new identities. Her yearning for an emotional connection finds her falling in and out of…
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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…
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The Bean Trees Anniversary Edition
Taylor, a poor Kentuckian making her way west with an abandoned baby girl, stops in Tucson where she finds friends and discovers resources in apparently empty places.
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Folly and Glory
"As this finale opens, Tasmin and her family are under irksome, though comfortable, arrest in Mexican Santa Fe. Her father, the eccentric Lord Berrybender, is planning to head for Texas with his whole family and his retainers, English, American and Native American. Tasmin, who would once have followed her husband, Jim Snow, anywhere, is no longer even sure she likes him, or knows where to go…
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Where you belong
Barbara Taylor Bradford's unique blend of passion and intrigue has made her one of the most cherished storytellers in the world. Her new novel is vintage Bradford: a powerful, suspenseful story of one woman's search to find out where she belongs, in life, in love, and within herself....Where You BelongVal Denning, a willowy war photographer, left her American family--and cruelly unloving…
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Voyage Out
“The Voyage Out” by Virginia Woolf.
This is a story about a young English woman, Rachel, on a sea voyage from London, to a South American coastal city of Santa Marina. As I read the story, the title of the story became a metaphor for Rachel's inner journey.
The inner journey within this story is perhaps best summarized in the author's words:
“The next few months passed away, as many years…
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