Showing titles in Coming of Age

Random House presents the audiobook edition of Bridge of Clay by Markus Zusak. From the internationally acclaimed, prize-winning, best-selling author of The Book Thief, here is a story told backwards and inside out. The five Dunbar brothers are living - fighting, dreaming, loving - in the perfect squalor of a house without grownups. Today, the father who abandoned them is about to walk back in. But why has he returned, and who have the boys become since he left?

Two murderous Celtic goddesses...a journeyman druid on the run...and a sealed grimoire that holds the key to his survival. Can Colin unlock it in time to save the people he loves? Colin McCool here, junkyard druid and trouble magnet extraordinaire. Recently, I fought the giant king of Jotunheim in a bid to save my druid master’s life. I failed in that task - now it’s up to me to keep druidry alive. Problem is, the Mórrígan and her sorceress sidekick Fuamnach are out to erase me from the face of the Earth.

The youngest daughter of Algerian immigrants, Fatima Daas is raised in a home where love and sexuality are considered taboo, and signs of affection avoided. Living in the majority-Muslim suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois, she often spends more than three hours a day on public transportation to and from the city, where she feels like a tourist observing Parisian manners. And as she gains distance from her family and comes into her own, she grapples more directly with her attraction to women and how it fits with her religion, which she continues to practice.

On a stifling summer day, an old Chevy Impala ignored the warning signals and was annihilated by the oncoming train. What no one realized until much later was that the driver had paused just before entering the tracks and kicked a small boy out of the car. A small boy with broken glasses who is clutching a notebook with all his might...but who never speaks.

When Jade is given a scholarship to an elite private college in Connecticut, she sees it as a chance to finally escape her painful past and get a fresh start. She’s determined to succeed and that means keeping her focus on school and not guys. But that plan falls apart her first day on campus when Garret, a wealthy prep school boy with swimmer abs and a perfect smile, offers to help her move in. Jade tries to push him away but she can’t deny her attraction to him and Garret won’t let her.

In this bewitching debut novel, a sensitive teen, newly arrived in Alabama, falls in love, questions his faith, and navigates a strange power. While his German parents don't know what to make of a South pining for the past, shy Max thrives in the thick heat. Taken in by the football team, he learns how to catch a spiraling ball, how to point a gun, and how to hide his innermost secrets.

A genealogy test sparks a woman’s reflection on the two accounts of her life--the real one and the one she’s always told the world--in this poignant short story by Cheryl Strayed, the bestselling author of Wild. In 1964, teenage Geraldine Waters was sent away by her parents to an unwed mothers’ home, where she gave up her newborn for adoption. Ever since, she’s lived an alternative narrative. Decades later, it’s time for Geraldine to reconcile the telling of her life, to finally grieve, and to discover what happened to that part of her past that slipped away.

MacKenzie Cahill has dealt with overbearing and overprotective brothers her entire life, making it near impossible to enjoy her teenage years. Having a boyfriend was practically impossible until she met a guy that wasn't afraid to stand up to them - Dominic. He was sweet, thoughtful, and everything MacKenzie ever wanted in a man. But when they go away to college at Old Dominion University, MacKenzie sees a whole new side of Dominic and begins to wonder if he really is different from every other guy.

Freshman Lianne Challice is known to millions of fans as Princess Vindi. But sometimes a silver-screen sorceress just wants to hang up her wand, tell her manager to shove it, and become a normal college student. Too bad that's harder than it looks. She's never lived a normal life. She hasn't been to school since kindergarten. And getting close to anyone is just too risky - the last boy she kissed sold the story to a British tabloid.

She's locked up tight. But he might be the key. Logan Reed is tall, tatted and tempting. Kit's a woman with a mean right hook and a secret. Kit wants a tattoo, but Logan sees more than she intended in the drawing she shows him. He sees her in ways no one ever has. Logan's not disabled; but he hasn't spoken in eight years. He hasn't needed to. Until he meets Kit.

Everything seemed possible in the summer of 1951. Back then Betty Stern was an eighteen-year-old knockout working at her grandparents’ lakeside resort. The "Catskills of the Midwest" was the perfect place for Betty to prepare for bigger things. She’d head to college in New York City. Her career as a fashion editor would flourish. But first, she’d enjoy a wondrous last summer at the beach falling deeply in love with an irresistible college boy and competing in the annual Miss South Haven pageant. On the precipice of a well-planned life, Betty’s future was limitless.

The first part of Willa Cather’s Great Plains trilogy, O Pioneers! follows the tragedies and triumphs of Alexandra Bergson, a strong and independent young woman who inherits the family farm following the death of her father.

In her best-selling memoirs, Ruth Reichl has long illuminated the theme of how food defines us, and never more so than in her dazzling fiction debut about sisters, family ties, and a young woman who must finally let go of guilt and grief to embrace her own true gifts.

Hayat Shah was captivated by Mina long before he met her: his mother's beautiful, brilliant, and soulfully devout friend is a family legend. When he learns that Mina is leaving Pakistan to live with the Shahs in America, Hayat is thrilled. Hayat's father is less enthusiastic. He left the fundamentalist world behind with reason. What no one expects is that when Mina shows Hayat the beauty and power of the Quran, it will utterly transform the boy.

In her first weeks at Hawthorne College, Malin is swept up into a tight-knit circle that will stick together through all four years. There’s Gemma, an insecure theater major from London; John, a tall, handsome, wealthy New Englander; Max, John’s cousin, a shy pre-med major; Khaled, a wisecracking prince from Abu Dhabi; and Ruby, a beautiful art history major. But Malin isn’t like the rest of her friends. She’s an expert at hiding her troubled past - all while using her extraordinary insight to detect their deepest vulnerabilities and weaknesses.

In 1951, a mysterious old woman confronts Pilar Aguirre in the small border town of La Cienega, Texas. The old woman is sure Pilar stole her husband and, in a heated outburst, lays a curse on Pilar and her family. More than forty years later, Lulu Muñoz is dodging chaos at every turn: her troubled father’s moods, his rules, her secret life as singer in a punk band, but most of all her upcoming quinceañera. When her beloved grandmother passes away, Lulu finds herself drawn to the glamorous stranger who crashed the funeral and who lives alone and shunned on the edge of town.

The ancient prophecy speaks of the five, those who will come to save all of dragonkind. Like most prophecies, it leaves out a lot of the important details. The very ordinary elf girl who runs for the hills - and gets lost in a forest instead. The dragon egg, precariously perched high in a tree on a dark winter's night. And what happens when egg meets girl.

Eleven-year-old Nedda Papas is obsessed with becoming an astronaut. In 1986 in Easter, a small Florida Space Coast town, her dreams seem almost within reach - if she can just grow up fast enough. Theo, the scientist father she idolizes, is consumed by his own obsessions. Laid off from his job at NASA and still reeling from the loss of Nedda's newborn brother several years before, Theo turns to the dangerous dream of extending his living daughter's childhood just a little longer. The result is an invention that alters the fabric of time.

‘Women can be heroes, too’. When twenty-year-old nursing student, Frances “Frankie” McGrath, hears these unexpected words, it is a revelation. Raised on California’s idyllic Coronado Island and sheltered by her conservative parents, she has always prided herself on doing the right thing, being a good girl. But in 1965 the world is changing, and she suddenly imagines a different path for her life. When her brother ships out to serve in Vietnam, she impulsively joins the Army Nurses Corps and follows his path.

"Je suis parti en courant, tout à coup. Juste le temps d'entendre ma mère dire Qu'est-ce qui fait le débile là ? Je ne voulais pas rester à leur côté..."