Showing titles in Coming of Age

Tucker, with the help of his new assertive friend Kiara, must learn to balance his newfound freedom with school and a job, and if he meets a cute boy on the way, then that's just an added bonus. Paint is a story of self-discovery, of queerness outside the family-friendly safety net of a high school drama, and of drag queens when you need them the most.

After a string of sexual conquests, she is determined to figure out why the intense romantic connections she's spent her life chasing have left her emotionally high and dry. As Natalie sifts through her past and her present, she confronts her complicated feelings about her plus-sized figure, her bisexuality, and her thwarted career in fashion design.

In 1990, Vijay and Indu leave India for Australia, seeking a better life for their family. But the move isn't easy on anyone. Not gentle Indu who becomes disconnected from her family and her life; nor the ambitious Vijay, who finds himself unmoored in a culture he doesn't understand. At the centre is Archana, their quiet daughter, for whom a growing understanding of her own queerness grates against the realities of her life.

In October 1940, the handsome young David Sparsholt arrives in Oxford. A keen athlete and oarsman, he at first seems unaware of the effect he has on others - particularly on the lonely and romantic Evert Dax, son of a celebrated novelist and destined to become a writer himself. While the Blitz rages in London, Oxford exists at a strange remove: an ephemeral, uncertain place in which nightly blackouts conceal secret liaisons....

Dawson Angel is a teenager in small-town Kansas who has just told his best friend he is gay and soon regrets that decision. To make matters worse, he has also fallen in love with the neighbor boy, a handsome young Mennonite named Derek. Nothing seems to go right as the week progresses in this engaging tale of youth that reminds one of a modern Catcher in the Rye.

In this collection, Catherine Lundoff, D. L. King, Cheyenne Blue, Kristina Wright, Jean Roberta, and 15 other writers offer up no-holds-barred, all-holds-hot tales of the highs and lows and kinky twists of first times. Coeds acting out for Girls Gone Wild get even wilder once the cameraman goes home. A lonely businesswoman discovers how far and hard her young chauffeur can drive her. Butch buddies find secret desires racing out of control. A summer job building trails sparks trailblazing into all-new territory.

It's a destiny thrown upon her too soon, and one she's not even sure she wants. After killing her uncle, Hyde, and capturing his rebels, Trinity must repair relations between Humans and Angorians. She must find a way to ease their fears and assure them that Angorians will not cause them harm.

26-year-old Akash Amin has everything he ever wanted, but as he tries to kickstart his songwriting career and commit to his boyfriend, he is haunted by the painful memories of the first boy he ever loved. When his mother tells him she is selling the family home, Akash returns to Illinois, hoping to finally move on. Renu Amin always seemed perfect: doting husband, beautiful house, healthy sons. But as the one-year anniversary of her husband's death approaches, Renu can't stop wondering if she chose the wrong life thirty-five years ago.

Lizzy is your average teenager, not able to take a break from life's bad idea of a joke. Her life is hell, and her parents are the demons of her prison. One bad choice after another leads her to her ultimate demise: uncovering a secret that was hidden from her since birth.

Benson and Mike are two young guys who live together in Houston. Mike is a Japanese American chef at a Mexican restaurant and Benson's a Black day care teacher, and they've been together for a few years - good years - but now they're not sure why they're still a couple. There's the sex, sure and the meals Mike cooks for Benson, and, well, they love each other. But when Mike finds out his estranged father is dying in Osaka just as his acerbic Japanese mother, Mitsuko, arrives in Texas for a visit, Mike picks up and flies across the world to say goodbye.

Raised as a boy in a grand but unhappy family in Nigeria, Otolorin Akinro escapes to boarding school knowing two things: she is truly a girl, and to stay safe, she must hide that truth. Away from the cruelty of her childhood home, Oto blooms even as she strives to be the best boy she can, finding true friendship and working hard to earn a scholarship to an American university, hoping someone out there might help her understand the secrets her body holds.

August is a God-fearing track star who leaves Enugu City to attend university and escape his overbearing sisters. He carries the weight of their lofty expectations, the shame of facing himself, and the haunting memory of a mother he never knew. It's his first semester and pressures aside, August is making friends and doing well in his classes. He even almost has a girlfriend. There's only one problem: he can't stop thinking about Segun, an openly gay student who works at a local cybercafé.

Love, sex, death, family, friendship, betrayal, tenderness, brutality, sacrifice and revelation. This incendiary collection of stories from acclaimed writer Christos Tsiolkas, best-selling author of The Slap and Barracuda, takes you deep into worlds both strange and familiar, and introduces you to characters who will never let you go and situations that will haunt you forever.

Winner of the 2017 Red Hen Press Women’s Prose Prize, Like Wings, Your Hands is both a philosophical novel and a coming-of-age story, exploring a mother-son relationship in the context of disability and interdependence....

Eighteen years old, pregnant and working as a pizza delivery girl, our dysfunctional heroine is deeply lost and in complete denial about it all. She’s grieving the death of her father, avoiding her loving boyfriend and flagrantly ignoring her future. Her world is further upended when she becomes obsessed with Jenny, a stay-at-home mother new to the neighbourhood, who comes to depend on weekly deliveries of pickle-covered pizzas for her son’s happiness.

In the 1960s, Midwestern boy and Boy Scout, Nathan delivers newspapers and mows lawns. Nathan uses his cover to move about yards and sneak into the homes of his neighbors, uncovering their secrets. In high school, one of the local misfits introduces him to diet pills, which help him overcome his shyness. In an amphetamine high, he meets Cindy, who he hopes will steer him along the “morally straight” path of the Boy Scout Oath he swore to.

London, 2014. Hal Lancaster – twenty-two, gay, Catholic, chops lines of cocaine with his myWaitrose card – is the reluctant heir of his father Henry, the sixteenth Duke of Lancaster. Henry is half tyrant, half martyr, with an investment in his eldest son that has grown into an obsession. While Hal floats between internships and drinking sessions, Henry keeps him in check with passive-aggression, religious guilt, and a cruelty that Hal sometimes confuses for tenderness.

Best mates Karl and Abu are both 17 and live near King's Cross. It's 2011 and racial tensions are set to explode across London. Abu is infatuated with gorgeous classmate Nalini but dares not speak to her. Meanwhile, Karl is the target of the local "wannabe" thugs just for being different. When Karl finds out his father lives in Nigeria, he decides that Port Harcourt is the best place to escape the sound and fury of London, and connect with a Dad he's never known. Rejected on arrival, Karl befriends Nakale, an activist who wants to expose ecocide....

REBEL IN VENUS takes place over one 'girl's night in' spent between best friends, Maria and Layla. Over the course of the witty and unexpected evening, Layla's memory is jolted, and her once carefully repressed past begins to return to her, triggering a sequence of events that ultimately jeopardizes Layla's unconventional life. In REBEL IN VENUS, the bold, and sometimes brutally honest stories that unfold, are filled with sexual revelations, high-school humiliations, unwanted pregnancies, unwavering friendships, sex work, divorce, and loss.

When Michael Dawouk is disowned by his Muslim family for being gay, he turns his back on the religion and culture he grew up with. He is forced out onto the street, only to be taken in by a former high school teacher who offers him room and board in exchange for sex. Michael is soon left with nothing to believe in, until he meets Wyatt, a successful Texan businessman who takes him under his wing. But what Michael can’t see is that his mentor is just as lost as he is.