15 books like Stillwater
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
Practical Magic
For more than two hundred years, the Owens women had been blamed for everything that went wrong in their Massachusetts town. And Gillian and Sally endured that fate as well; as children, the sisters were outsiders. Their elderly aunts almost seemed to encourage the whispers of witchery, but all Gillian and Sally wanted was to escape.
One would do so by marrying, the other by running away. But…
Shares: Massachusetts in fiction, Massachusetts
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
Dark Angel
At last, Heaven would find the happiness she longed for... free from the scorn and contempt of her past!
In her grandmother's fine, rich Boston house, Heaven Leigh Casteel dreamed of a wonderful new life -- of new friends, the best schools, beautiful clothes and most important, love. The pearls of culture, wisdom and breeding would now be hers. Soon she would make the Casteel name respectable,…
Shares: Grandmothers, Grandparents
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.
Shares: Teenage boys, Bildungsromans
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
Whistling past the graveyard
Determined to get to Nashville to find her mother in 1963, nine-year-old spitfire Starla Claudelle runs away from her strict grandmother's Mississippi home, eventually accepting a ride from a Eula, a black woman traveling alone with a white baby.
In 1963, determined to get to Nashville to find her mother, nine-year-old spitfire Starla runs away from her strict grandmother's Mississippi home. …
Shares: Grandmothers, Bildungsromans
Anthem of a Reluctant Prophet
“Stan,” I said, and I said it kind of loud so of course he had to look up. “Tomorrow morning: 8:37. The red van with the out-of-state plates? You go head to head. You lose. You die.” After freakishly foretelling the death of a friend, Luke Hunter becomes big news in Stokum, his rank little pinprick of a hometown. Terrified, but pretending not to be, Luke holds everyone—the local media, his buddy…
Shares: Teenage boys, 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…
Shares: Teenage boys, 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…
Shares: Teenage boys, Bildungsromans
The Sea House
The architect Klaus Lehmann loves his wife, Elsa, with a passion that continues throughout their married life, despite long periods of separation. Almost half a century after Lehmann's death in the village of Steerborough, a young woman, Lily, arrives to research his life and work. Poring over Klaus's letters to Elsa, Lily pieces together the story of their lives. And alone in her rented cottage…
Shares: Grandparents, Bildungsromans
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.
Shares: Teenage boys, 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.
Shares: Teenage boys, Bildungsromans
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
Shares: Teenage boys, Bildungsromans
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…
Shares: Teenage boys, Bildungsromans