17 books like The Last Samurai
About a Boy
Nick Hornby's second bestselling novel is about sex, manliness and fatherhood. Will is thirty-six, comfortable and child-free. And he's discovered a brilliant new way of meeting women - through single-parent groups. Marcus is twelve and a little bitnerdish: he's got the kind of mother who made him listen to Joni Mitchell rather than Nirvana. Perhaps they can help each other out a little bit, and…
Shares: Single mothers, London
With the Fire on High
With her daughter to care for and her abuela to help support, high school senior Emoni Santiago has to make the tough decisions, and do what must be done. The one place she can let her responsibilities go is in the kitchen, where she adds a little something magical to everything she cooks, turning her food into straight-up goodness. Still, she knows she doesn’t have enough time for her school’s…
Shares: Single mothers, Coming-of-age
Big girl small
With a singing voice that can shake an auditorium, Judy should be the star of Darcy Academy, the local performing arts high school. So why is a girl this promising hiding out in a seedy motel room on the edge of town? A scathingly funny and moving book about dreams and reality, at once light on its feet and profound.
Shares: Gifted children, Coming-of-age
The exile
The woman Finn O'Grady swore to protect is convinced an ancient curse has put her family in danger. O'Grady has seen too much evil to believe in the supernatural. And then the killing starts.
Shares: Single mothers, London
Mr. Churchill's Secretary
"London, 1940, and Maggie Hope has graduated at the top of her college class, but her gender qualifies her only to be the newest typist at No. 10 Downing Street. Her indefatigable spirit and remarkable gifts for code breaking, though, rival those of even the highest men in government, and Maggie finds that working for the prime minister affords her a level of clearance she could never have…
Shares: Americans, London
Belinda
Maria Edgeworth won the admiration of her contemporaries Jane Austen and Walter Scott as well as later writers such as Thackeray and Turgenev. In Belinda (1801) she tackles issues of gender and race in a manner at once comic and thought-provoking. Braving the perils of the marriage market, Belinda learns to think for herself as the examples of her friends prove singularly unreliable.
Edgeworth's…
Shares: London, Coming-of-age
The Innocent Libertine (Heirs of Acadia #2)
Davis and his wife, Isabella, are continuing the historical saga of a pivotal time in America's past with descendants of those courageous Acadians. In The Innocent Libertine, the impulsive young American Abigail Aldridge becomes increasingly outraged by the chasm between her Christian ideals and the plight of the poor. A well-intentioned social outreach puts her right in the middle of disaster,…
Shares: Americans, London
Skylight Confessions
Writing at the height of her powers, Alice Hoffman conjures three generations of a family haunted by love. Cool, practical, and deliberate, John is dreamy Arlyn's polar opposite. Yet the two are drawn powerfully together even when it is clear they are bound to bring each other grief. Their difficult marriage leads them and their children to a house made of glass in theConnecticut…
Shares: Mothers and sons, Coming-of-age
Private London
For Hannah Shapiro, a beautiful young American student, this particular nightmare began eight years ago in Los Angeles, when Jack Morgan, owner of Private - the world's most exclusive detective agency - saved her from a horrific death. She has fled her country, but can't flee her past. The terror has followed her to London, and now it is down to former Royal Military Police Sergeant Dan Carter,…
Shares: Americans, London
The Good Luck Of Right Now
When his mother dies, 38-year-old Bartholomew Neil, who doesn't know how to be on his own, discovers a letter in his mother's underwear drawer that causes him to write a series of highly intimate letters to actor Richard Gere, while embarking on a quest to find out where he belongs.
Shares: Mothers and sons, Coming-of-age
The secret wisdom of the earth
"After witnessing the death of his younger brother in a terrible home accident, 14-year-old Kevin and his grieving mother are sent for the summer to live with Kevin's grandfather. In this peeled-paint coal town deep in Appalachia, Kevin quickly falls in with a half-wild hollow kid named Buzzy Fink who schools him in the mysteries and magnificence of the woods. The events of this fateful summer…
Shares: Mothers and sons, Coming-of-age
The Cruise of the Snark
In April 1907 Jack London set out to sail around the world in the 45-foot ship The Snark, accompanied by his wife and a small crew. Although suffering from seasickness and tropical disease, London wrote prolifically, including a series of entertaining sketches of the voyage itself. These were later collected as The Cruise of the Snark, a remarkable record of adventure and love among the islands…
Shares: Americans, London
Ben, in the World
"Ben Lovatt can never fit in. To those he meets, he seems awkward: too big, too strong, inhumanly made. He baffles and he terrifies: those who do not understand him want him locked up.".
"His own mother locked him up; then, guilty, she liberated him. But her unyielding love for him corroded their family; this fifth child broke the home into bits. And now he has come of age and again finds…
Shares: Mothers and sons, London
Portnoy's Complaint
Though is caused outrage and controversy at the time of its publication Roth’s comic novel of sexual obsession and frustration is now widely regarded as one of the best novels of the twentieth century.
Shares: Mothers and sons, Coming-of-age
Shuggie Bain
Shuggie Bain is the unforgettable story of young Hugh “Shuggie” Bain, a sweet and lonely boy who spends his 1980s childhood in run-down public housing in Glasgow, Scotland. Thatcher’s policies have put husbands and sons out of work, and the city’s notorious drugs epidemic is waiting in the wings.
Shuggie’s mother Agnes walks a wayward path: she is Shuggie’s guiding light but a burden for him and…
Shares: Mothers and sons, Coming-of-age
All the Pretty Horses
All the Pretty Horses is a novel by American author Cormac McCarthy published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1992. Its romanticism (in contrast to the bleakness of McCarthy's earlier work) brought the writer much public attention. It was a bestseller, and it won both the U.S. National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Along with The Crossing (1994), and Cities of the Plain (1998), it…
Shares: Americans, Coming-of-age
The perfect gentleman
"Imran Ahmad shares his story of life as a Pakistani Muslim growing up in England in this coming-of-age memoir"--Provided by the publisher.
Shares: London, Coming-of-age