The most recommended bildungsroman books

Oreo (originally published in 1974, then out of print, and finally repopularized by Harriette Mullen and republished in 2000), a satirical novel by Fran Ross, a journalist and, briefly, a comedy writer for Richard Pryor, is widely considered to be “before its time.” This aching and hilarious, experimentally structured story is about a girl, Oreo, with a Jewish father and a Black mother, who ventures to New York City to find her father only to discover there are hundreds of Sam Schwartzes in the phonebook, and then goes on a quest to find him.

Growing up five hours away in Minnesota, I had no idea that Lake Geneva, Wisconsin – a small Midwest town surrounded by farmland – was home to a Playboy Club for over a decade. Clancy, a born-and-bred Wisconsinite, did her research, dramatizing the lives of local women before, during, and after their stints in the club with ample heart and heartbreak. Capturing the dreams, complexity, and contradictions of rural Midwestern women as well as anyone this side of Bonnie Jo Campbell, it’s become one of the books I recommend to anyone who wants to understand my home region.

A girl is haunted by events that shaped her destiny early on. A father who vanished without a trace. A mother who took her own life along with those of her other children by leaping from the roof of a building. There is a witness and a survivor, and this beautiful novel is the latter's story, as well as an examination of race. She is her father's Black and her mother's White daughter. Her racial identity therefore is both and neither, dependent on how one sees her, or how she chooses to see herself on any given day. Exploration of racial as well as family dynamics are themes that I am strongly drawn to read as well as write about. Durrow blends the two masterfully.

This lush book, written in 1994, is now something of a classic.

Ingrid is scorned by a man that she sees as being beneath her so she poisons him, and is sent to prison, leaving her daughter Astrid to navigate a series of foster care and adolescence all on her own.

The sweep of descriptive language is lush and languid as the California it depicts. I read this book repeatedly when it first came out, I felt Astrid’s pain as my own. 

In my opinion, Stephen King is even better at crafting coming-of-age tales than he is at horror, and The Body might be his best.

I love how this book portrays the adventures of childhood—being chased by dogs, walking the train tracks, puffing cigarettes around a fire as the night sets in—as being totally unique and new, exciting experiences. This story, in my view, is the perfect template for any good childhood adventure story. 

This is the debut novel by Ely Percy, and tells the story of Kirsty Campbell, an ordinary Scottish girl as she navigates her way through high school in Renfrewshire.

An extremely relatable novel, it is told in short, buzzy chapters, and I love it for relating the best of what a Scottish working-class childhood can give you – resilience, humour, and the will to succeed. The book covers issues like teen pregnancy, drugs, and violence, but it does so without lecturing; rather, it celebrates what it means to be brought up in contemporary, working-class Scotland.

Peggy is eight years old when her survivalist father takes her from her London home and moves her into a remote cabin in the woods and tells her the outside world has been destroyed. They can’t go back. 

If you know anything about my novels, it’s that I absolutely love writing adult fiction from the perspective of young adults. People often ask me why I don’t write YA if I enjoy that age for narrators: it’s because I love coming-of-age stories and the emotional spectrum of children learning to understand the nuances of adult life.  

This book nailed it for me: Mental illness, nature, and relationships to the natural world, a young narrator. I’ve read it twice and it broke my heart both times.

I don’t have words for how masterful this book is. (I know, I’m a writer, I’m supposed to have words). I’m constantly blown away by Schmidt’s writing. The novel, set in 1968, is the story of fourteen-year-old Doug Swieteck, whose abusive father moves the family to a new town. Doug’s first-person voice is so alive and original. He tells you a lot, but not everything. And what he’s hiding is revealed in scenes that will stay with me forever, among them one in PE class, and another when Doug’s brother returns from Vietnam. On every page, you sense Doug’s emotional armor, but also his vulnerability. His growth as a person and an artist makes it one of my favorite books of all time.

What does this book have to do with sports? Nothing.

What does it have to do with identity and community, and how the one pushes and pulls, rips and welds the other into form? With how histories can turn into hauntings and our fondest hopes into demons? Everything.

Randall Kenan died while I was finishing my book and I still haven’t really gotten over it. I’m always going to miss the words he never got to write, even as I cherish those he did.

This book is pure poetry to me. It follows the lives of three sisters on the precipice of adulthood during 1930s Greece.

I love that when it was published in the 1940s here in Greece, it was seen as a scandalous piece of literature. I can see why - Liberaki writes fervently and openly about the trials and tribulations of female teenhood, detailing gossip, romance, and even the loss of virginity with such poise and vim that it is still relevant and relatable to women today.

It was the kind of book that my own Greek Yiayia (grandmother) was absolutely not allowed to get her hands on. This book, for me, has it all. It’s bucolic, romantic, and oozes beautiful imagery of the hot, dry summers in Athens and the surrounding countryside. A perfect character study.

The Hummingbird’s Daughter is the first in a two-part book series about a real-life woman known as Teresita, a curandera (or Mexican folk healer) and revolutionary figure who was born in Mexico and lived in the U.S. for some time. Urrea, a descendant of Teresita, fictionalizes her life in the book. I hope readers fall in love with Teresita’s story and share it with others because she is one of many figures in North American history that we should all know.  

The magical realism in this novel makes an appearance through Teresita’s healing powers as a curandera. I’ve been obsessed with curanderismo, or the folk healing practice of Latin America that combines Indigenous and Catholic beliefs and practices, since I was in college. This is why curanderas make appearances in both my books.

The gorgeous cover is fitting for such lyrical writing. There were plenty of places where the stories made me smile, they were so well observed.

The author’s knowledge of post-Roman Britain and the superstitious Anglo-Saxon culture that followed shone through and it is little surprise to discover that Watson studied Old English (also known as Anglo-Saxon) at university. He says that as far as possible, he excluded all Norman French vocabulary from the Anglo-Saxon parts of Time After Time because the Norman Conquest was still more than four hundred years away. Despite this, the language and imagery are utterly transporting, and I found myself dawdling over many sections.

As well as the Anglo-Saxon storyteller, Watson also beautifully captures the character of the East Anglian boy in Napoleonic times on his first solo walk to Saffron Walden market in a frightening quest to buy Banbury Books. While the delightful mute girl… show more.

I didn’t know this book was considered “young adult” until my teenage niece pointed out that she’d been assigned the book in school. Yes, protagonist Emoni is a senior in high school, but she’s an old soul. She has to be, given the challenges she faces as a teen mother and a mixed-race woman. Emoni is strong and inspiring and determined, but her greatest gift is cooking. When Emoni makes a meal, her amazingness gets into the food and brings joy to its eaters. I love magical realism and this reminded me of Like Water for Chocolate, another novel in which she who prepares a meal infuses it with emotion. 

Emoni struggles, but she is surrounded by love and she gives it in return to the grandmother who raised her and the daughter she conceived as a high school freshman. Emoni has dreams of cooking school but she’s also… show more.

The omniscient narrator in this classic novel speaks to the reader in a dispassionate present-tense voice that helps reinforce the satirical tone and immediacy of the novel. Dickens, who grew up in a debtor’s prison and included his bleak observations of life in a debtor’s prison in many of his great novels, used his fiction to shine a light on the social injustices of Victorian life. Bleak House shines much of that light on the punitive legal system (sound like today?), which Dickens exposed in some of his other novels as well. In thinking about the many theatrical and film adaptations made of this novel, we can see how much easier that work was due to the present tense writing, which creates the immediacy and suspense found in many great films.

Another Pulitzer Prize winner, Middlesex deals with two types of strangers.

First, we follow a Greek family fleeing the horror and death of the 1920-22 Turkish-Greek war, eventually coming to the United States as immigrants. Second, a descendent of the family, variously known as Cal or Callie, is born intersex, with physical characteristics of both sexes.

Frankly, I had sort of avoided the book, fearing a tedious diatribe on suffering and intolerance. Imagine my surprise to find a story told with a delightfully light touch and great humor – and all the more touching because of it.

As this novel is set in 1970s Islamabad, Pakistan and the ex-pats are mainly American, it’s technically not about the British in India. But the ex-colonial legacy is there to see: Pakistan was a creation of independence from British rule and is still being affected by geo-politics. I was gripped by the description of life in the Pakistani capital; an area where my grandparents had lived and worked and through which I had travelled in the ’70s. This coming-of-age story is told by teenager Aliya, (half-Pakistani and half-Dutch) who attends the American school. Not only are the tensions of identity well portrayed but also the growing unease between the communities after a traffic accident leaves a young boy dead and world events ignite further unrest. Fascinating and unusual historical fiction.

Do you have to be captivated by aquariums and otherworldly travel to enjoy this book? No, but if, like me, you’ve always wondered what it would be like to have an octopus for a work wife or a boyfriend who’s moving to Mars, you’ll love Sea Change.

Come for the reality-bending critique of life on Earth; stay for the achingly true-to-life portrait of a daughter of Korean immigrants who’s just trying to make her way in the world.

Thanks to the evocative prose in Yvonne Woon’s If You, Then Me, I found myself swept up in the protagonist Xia’s vision of the Bay Area as a perfect paradise, despite the fact that I definitely know better.

I was rooting for Xia, a talented but lonely coder whose best friend is her AI app, even when she started making all kinds of questionable choices. Though I’ve seen this book characterized as a rom com, I actually think it’s more of a modern fairy tale—in all the best ways. 

A mix of coming of age in the first half of the twentieth century, and Bradbury’s peculiar brand of very earthly oddness and sci-fi strangeness, Dandelion Wine is full of all sorts of magic. It reminds you of what it is to be a small human again, when everything seems possible, and aliens and monsters are as likely (and as important) as long summer days spent outside, barefoot and sunburnt and a little feral. Even when we don’t recognise the details of the childhood described, we remember the feeling, and it reawakens a sense of wonder that’s incredibly precious.

This really is a gem of a book. The reader is left guessing whether it is a memoir, auto-fiction, or stand-alone fiction. From its deceptively simple beginning, it cleverly deals with so many of life's big issues with a thoughtful lightness of touch. The book is written from the perspective of grown-up Michael, but Ondaatje explores the confusion and frustration of the child who was made to sail halfway around the world to a new home and the subsequent impact the journey has on the adult Michael.