I'm fascinated by these books about coming of age because they all share elements of my own experience. While I was growing up, I was told by my parents that my life on board our boat Wavewalker was ‘privileged’ and that I was lucky not to live a ‘boring’ life like other children. It took me a long time to question this view, and even longer to find an escape. As an adult looking back, I now know that many of the things I was told by my parents were not true. That experience of growing up and discovering that what you have been told is not right is deeply disturbing, while also being liberating.
I love this book because, although it tells a difficult story of growing up in extreme poverty in rural America, it is written in prose that is sparing and unsentimental.
It is clear that – like me – Jeannette was desperate to love her parents, Rex and Rose Mary, despite their failings, but found this increasingly difficult as she became older and more conscious of the differences between her life and the lives of other children.
In the end, again like me, Jeanette had to run away from her parents to create a more stable and caring future.
Now a major motion picture starring Brie Larson, Naomi Watts and Woody Harrelson.
This is a startling memoir of a successful journalist's journey from the deserted and dusty mining towns of the American Southwest, to an antique filled apartment on Park Avenue. Jeanette Walls narrates her nomadic and adventurous childhood with her dreaming, 'brilliant' but alcoholic parents.
At the age of seventeen she escapes on a Greyhound bus to New York with her older sister; her younger siblings follow later. After pursuing the education and civilisation her parents sought to escape, Jeanette eventually succeeds in her quest for the 'mundane,…
When I read Tara’s story of growing up isolated in Idaho, USA, I couldn’t believe how similar her childhood was to mine, though she experienced it on land, and I was at sea.
Like me, Tara was unable to go to school. In her case she was trapped at home with a father who was convinced that the world was about to end. She accepted this world when she was young but, as she became older, she repeatedly tried to make her life more normal and became convinced that education was the way in which she could escape.
The book also covers quite a long period after Tara escapes, and again I found the similarities disconcerting – for example, we both struggled socially initially and both missed many vaccinations during our childhood (not to mention dental and medical care).
Selected as a book of the year by AMAZON, THE TIMES, SUNDAY TIMES, GUARDIAN, NEW YORK TIMES, ECONOMIST, NEW STATESMAN, VOGUE, IRISH TIMES, IRISH EXAMINER and RED MAGAZINE
'One of the best books I have ever read . . . unbelievably moving' Elizabeth Day 'An extraordinary story, beautifully told' Louise O'Neill 'A memoir to stand alongside the classics . . . compelling and joyous' Sunday Times
Tara Westover grew up preparing for the end of the world. She was never put in school, never taken to the doctor. She did not even have a birth certificate…
This memoir chronicles the lives of three generations of women with a passion for reading, writing, and travel. The story begins in 1992 in an unfinished attic in Brooklyn as the author reads a notebook written by her grandmother nearly 100 years earlier. This sets her on a 30-year search…
I love Kazuo Ishiguro’s work and this is my favourite book of his.
Never Let Me Go is the fictional story of a childhood that initially seems acceptable, despite the early indications that something strange is going on. As the story proceeds, however, it becomes clear that this is a horrific world, one in which children are being grown for their organs.
But the power of the story for me is not the revelation itself but the way in which it is revealed, layer by layer, as the characters become older and more knowing. That experience of becoming aware that all is not right with your world, and then trying to come to terms with that, is something I can resonate with.
One of the most acclaimed novels of the 21st Century, from the Nobel Prize-winning author
Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize
Kazuo Ishiguro imagines the lives of a group of students growing up in a darkly skewed version of contemporary England. Narrated by Kathy, now thirty-one, Never Let Me Go dramatises her attempts to come to terms with her childhood at the seemingly idyllic Hailsham School and with the fate that has always awaited her and her closest friends in the wider world. A story of love, friendship and memory, Never Let Me Go is charged throughout with a sense…
This book is a little different because, although it is a coming of age in a way, the characters within it are already young adults when the story begins.
What I love about it though is that (like in many of the other books I have selected) the young people in this tale start off in a world that superficially is one thing – a beautiful tropical island - but then becomes something very different – a horrifically violent community. That divergence of the appearance of a place from the reality of living within it is fascinating.
On Richard's first night in Bangkok, a fellow traveller slits his wrists, leaving Richard a map to "the Beach", where white sands circle a lagoon hidden from the sea, coral gardens and freshwater falls are surrounded by jungle. Richard was looking for adventure, and now he has found it.
This book is set in Montauk, under looming threat from a warming climate and overdevelopment. Now outsider Clancy, a thirty-six-year-old claims adjuster scarred by his orphan childhood, has inherited an unexpected legacy: the power to decide the fate of Montauk’s last parcel of undeveloped land. Everyone in town has a…
This book describes a fictional coming of age in which a child starts to question the assumptions made by the adults around them – in this case the value of the Glass Bead Game of the title.
It is a brilliant piece of writing – so brilliant that it won the Nobel Prize for Literature. It not only (gloriously) chronicles the boy’s awakening, it also raises deeper questions about how society should be structured, and in particular whether it is right to support an elite who contribute little to the welfare of others.
The Glass Bead Game is an ultra-aesthetic game which is played by the scholars, creamed off in childhood and nurtured in elite schools, in the province of Castalia. The Master of the Glass Bead Game, Joseph Knecht, holds the most exalted office in Castalia. He personifies the detachment, serenity and aesthetic vision which reward a life dedicated to perfection of the intellect. But can, indeed should, man live isolated from hunger, family, children, women, in a perfect world where passions are tamed by meditation, where academic discipline and order are paramount? This is Herman Hesse’s great novel. It is a…
I grew up trapped on a boat for almost a decade. To outsiders my world seemed like paradise, but in reality, it became a prison in which I couldn’t build friendships, go to school, or – for long periods – even get ashore. As the years passed, and my relationship with my parents deteriorated, the limitations of my world became clearer, and knew I had to escape – the question was how?
This climate fiction novel follows four generations of women and their battles against a global giant that controls and manipulates Earth’s water. Told mostly through a diary and drawing on scientific observation and personal reflection, Lynna’s story unfolds incrementally, like climate change itself. Her gritty memoir describes a near-future Toronto…
Return to Hope Creek is a second-chance rural romance set in Australia.
Stella Simpson's career and engagement are over. She returns to the rural community of Hope Creek to heal, unaware her high school and college sweetheart, Mitchell Scott, has also moved back to town to do some healing of…
