16 books like The Deadman's Pedal

What to read after The Deadman's Pedal — books similar to it, matched on shared themes.

Imago bird Nicholas Mosley · 1980 · ★ 3.5 · 185p · ≈ 6h · Moderate "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

Bendigo Shafter Louis L'Amour · 1979 · ★ 4.2 · 324p · ≈ 10h · Moderate 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 Ruth L. Ozeki · 2021 · ★ 4.0 · 560p · ≈ 18h · Moderate 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

Anthem of a Reluctant Prophet Joanne Proulx · 2007 · ★ 4.0 · 368p · ≈ 12h · Moderate “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 Aravind Adiga · 2001 · ★ 3.2 · 320p · ≈ 10h · Moderate 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 Jonathan Lethem · 2003 · ★ 3.8 · 511p · ≈ 17h · Moderate 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

Lili Annie Wang · 2001 · ★ 4.0 · 320p · ≈ 10h · Moderate 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: Social conditions, Bildungsromans

Brewster Mark Slouka · 2013 · ★ 3.9 · 288p · ≈ 9h · Moderate 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

Demian Hermann Hesse · 1919 · ★ 4.1 · 171p · ≈ 5h · Challenging 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, Social conditions, Bildungsromans

Stillwater William F. Weld · 2002 · ★ 4.1 · 237p · ≈ 7h · Moderate 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… Shares: Teenage boys, Bildungsromans

Lawn boy Jonathan Evison · 2018 · ★ 3.9 · 320p · ≈ 10h · Moderate "Mike Muñoz is a young Mexican American not too many years out of high school--and just fired from his latest gig as a lawn boy on a landscaping crew. Though he tries time and again to get his foot on the first rung of that ladder to success, he can't seem to get a break. But then things start to change for Mike, and after a raucous, jarring, and challenging trip, he finds he can finally see the… Shares: Social conditions, Bildungsromans

The Catcher in the Rye J. D. Salinger · 1945 · ★ 3.8 · 255p · ≈ 8h · Challenging 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 Chaim Potok · 1966 · ★ 4.1 · 284p · ≈ 9h · Moderate 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

Voyage Out Virginia Woolf · 1915 · ★ 3.8 “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… Shares: Social conditions, Bildungsromans

Nada Carmen Laforet · 1945 · ★ 3.5 · 272p · ≈ 9h · Challenging Nada es la primera novela de la escritora barcelonesa Carmen Laforet y una de las obras literarias más importantes de la España del siglo XX. Se trata de una obra existencialista que representa el estancamiento y la pobreza que se vivieron en la posguerra española, durante los primeros años del franquismo. Dotada de un estilo literario que supuso una renovación en la prosa de la época, Nada… Shares: Social conditions, Bildungsromans

The Perks of Being a Wallflower Stephen Chbosky · 1999 · ★ 4.5 · 221p · ≈ 7h · Moderate The Perks of Being a Wallflower is a young adult coming-of-age epistolary novel by American writer Stephen Chbosky, which was first published on February 1, 1999, by Pocket Books. Set in the early 1990s, the novel follows Charlie, an introverted observing teenager, through his freshman year of high school in a Pittsburgh suburb. The novel details Charlie's unconventional style of thinking as he… Shares: Social conditions, Bildungsromans

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