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Bildungsromans

  • Auteur:
    Buday, Grant
    Sommaire:

    Kobzar Literary Award, Finalist. Eric Hoffer Award, Shortlist. City of Victoria Book Prize, Finalist.

    Vancouver, summer 1962. Cyril Andrachuk and Connie Chow are seventeen and in love. Cyril is the only Canadian-born member of the Andrachuk family, his parents and older brother having survived Stalin’s systematic starving of the Ukraine. His brother’s brittle bones are not the only legacy of Stalin. Cyril’s famine-free childhood has built up a distance between him and the rest of the household. His family’s past charges Cyril’s present with bitter overtones he barely understands and Cyril’s love of art is beyond his family’s comprehension; Cyril is destined to be a working man, not a working artist. In this house built on the edge of a cemetery, where his mother reviews the burials over her morning tea, creativity and joy are suspect. Mourning the early death of his father, Cyril finds solace in lovingly drawing his father’s metal-working tools and in his happiness with Connie. But his family’s resentment sows the seeds of betrayal, and Cyril must find a way to live with his family’s past in order to find his future. Art, love, and history furnish the setting in this tale. The Delusionist is a novel of longing, loss and rediscovered joy.

    Praise for The Delusionist: “Subtle and elegant, his account of one’s man’s stumble-filled movement toward his fate commands attention and gives readers new ways to comprehend the process of maturation.” (The Vancouver Sun) “Buday captures the ambiance of 1962 Vancouver like an archaeologist opening a time capsule …" (John Moore, BC BookWorld) " … a realistically uplifting portrayal of a child of immigrants who is trying to pull himself out of a rut." (The Globe and Mail)

  • Auteur:
    Phillips, Delores
    Sommaire:

    Fourteen-year-old Tangy Mae tells of the brutal physical and mental abuse that her mother inflicts on her and her ten siblings.

  • Auteur:
    Ardal, Maja
    Sommaire:

    Elsa is a typical fifteen-year-old growing up in the early 1960s. Her world revolves around independence, boys, and being popular at school, despite growing concerns surrounding the Cuban missile crisis. In fact, this is Elsa's opportunity to let loose before the world blows up. Knee-deep in teenage angst, her mission is clear: get drunk for the first time and lose her virginity. Though Elsa is old enough to feel the tense political climate, she is young enough to believe there might be a cure for everything. A comedic and compassionate sequel to Ardal's award-winning You Fancy Yourself, The Cure for Everything is a coming-of-age story about a teenager who discovers that the world is more complex than she could have imagined.

  • Auteur:
    Doane, Michael
    Sommaire:

    The Debut Novel From Michael Doane Written in the same tradition as On the Road and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Michael Doane’s The Crossing explores what it means to exist in 21st century America. She’s out on a pier, deep in the ocean. A tidal wave is coming. Standing at the edge of the earth where the sand is swallowed up by the salty sea, I call for her… So begins a young man’s journey west in search of his lost love. Haunted by nightmares of her memory, our nameless hero leaves home looking to solve a mystery. In the end, he discovers much more than he set out to find. --- What Readers Are Saying: “I’m almost finished with The Crossing and I can safely say now it’ll be among the best things I’ve read this year.” – Ricardo Fayet, Reedsy “I am really enjoying The Crossing. I am reminded of a Peter Gabriel song that says ‘it’s only in uncertainty we are naked and alive.’ The bike causes both the loss of love and the finding of new love including self love. It’s existential and essential.” – Robin Feldman, NAGC “The dialogue between characters especially rings true and some of the main character’s inner thoughts really resonate with me. I haven’t decided if this is a story about one young man or a commentary on society, but I’m enjoying the ride.” – Eric Walther, Photographer and Illustrator

  • Auteur:
    McCarthy, Cormac
    Sommaire:

    In The Crossing, Cormac McCarthy fulfills the promise of All the Pretty Horses and at the same time give us a work that is darker and more visionary, a novel with the unstoppable momentum of a classic western and the elegaic power of a lost American myth. In the late 1930s, sixteen-year-old Billy Parham captures a she-wolf that has been marauding his family's ranch. But instead of killing it, he decides to take it back to the mountains of Mexico. With that crossing, he begins an arduous and often dreamlike journey into a country where men meet ghosts and violence strikes as suddenly as heat-lightning--a world where there is no order "save that which death has put there." An essential novel by any measure, The Crossing is luminous and appalling, a book that touches, stops, and starts the heart and mind at once.

  • Auteur:
    House, Silas
    Sommaire:

    Easter is a devout Pentecostal, while Anneth is headstrong and restless. The two live in the heart of coal mining country, surrounded by the ghosts of their loved ones. One night, Easter meets El, the man that will become her husband. But their marriage drives a wedge between the sisters and soon Anneth heads to Nashville with a new husband of her own. As time passes, the two sisters struggle to forgive past transgressions, and love one another despite their differences.

  • Auteur:
    Tucker, Heather
    Sommaire:

    A stunning and lyrical debut novel. Vincent Appleton smiles at his daughters, raises a gun, and blows off his head. For the Appleton sisters, life had unravelled many times before. This time it explodes. Eight-year-old Hariet, known to all as Ari, is dispatched to Cape Breton and her Aunt Mary, who is purported to eat little girls. But Mary and her partner, Nia, offer an unexpected refuge to Ari and her steadfast companion, Jasper, an imaginary seahorse. Yet the respite does not last, and Ari is torn from her aunts and forced back to her twisted mother and fractured sisters. Her new stepfather, Len, and his family offer hope, but as Ari grows to adore them, she's severed violently from them too, when her mother moves in with the brutal Dick Irwin. Through the sexual revolution and drug culture of the 1960s, Ari struggles with her father's legacy and her mother's addictions, testing limits with substances that numb and men who show her kindness. Ari spins through a chaotic decade of loss and love, the devilish and divine, with wit, tenacity, and the astonishing balance unique to seahorses. The Clay Girl is a beautiful tour de force about a child sculpted by kindness, cruelty, and the extraordinary power of imagination, and her families--the one she's born in to and the one she creates.

  • Auteur:
    Williams, Carol Lynch
    Sommaire:

    Thirteen-year-old Kyra has grown up in an isolated community without questioning the fact that her father has three wives and she has twenty brothers and sisters. That is, without questioning it much---if you don't count her visits to the Ironton County Mobile Library on Wheels to read forbidden books, or her secret meetings with Joshua, the boy she hopes to choose for herself instead of having a man chosen for her. But when the Prophet decrees that Kyra must marry her sixty-year-old uncle---who already has six wives---she must make a desperate choice in the face of violence and her own fears of losing her family forever.

  • Auteur:
    Cormier, Robert
    Sommaire:

    Reissued now in hardcover with a new introduction by the author, Cormier's chilling look at the insidious world of gang intimidation and the abuse of power in a boys' boarding school is no less relevant today than it was in 1974. Stunned by his mother's recent death and appalled by the way his father sleepwalks through life, Jerry Renault, a New England high school student, ponders the poster in his locker. Do I dare disturb the universe? Part of his universe is Archie Costello, leader of a secret school society, the Virgils, and master of intimidation. Archie himself is intimidated by a cool, ambitious teacher into having the Virgils spearhead the annual fund-raising event, a chocolate sale. When Jerry refuses to be bullied into selling chocolates, he becomes a hero, but his defiance is a threat to Archie, the Virgils, and the school. In the inevitable showdown, Archie's skill at intimidation turns Jerry from hero to outcast, to victim, leaving him alone.

  • Auteur:
    Salinger, J.D.
    Sommaire:

    The hero-narrator of THE CATCHER IN THE RYE is an ancient child of sixteen, a native New Yorker named Holden Caulfield. Through circumstances that tend to preclude adult, secondhand description, he leaves his prep school in Pennsylvania and goes underground in New York City for three days.

    The boy himself is at once too simple and too complex for us to make any final comment about him or his story. Perhaps the safest thing we can say about Holden is that he was born in the world not just strongly attracted to beauty but, almost, hopelessly impaled on it.

    There are many voices in this novel: children's voices, adult voices, underground voices--but Holden's voice is the most eloquent of all. Transcending his own vernacular, yet remaining marvelously faithful to it, he issues a perfectly articulated cry of mixed pain and pleasure. However, like most lovers and clowns and poets of the higher orders, he keeps most of the pain to, and for, himself. The pleasure he gives away, or sets aside, with all his heart. It is there for the reader who can handle it to keep.

  • Auteur:
    Messud, Claire
    Sommaire:

    A bracing, hypnotic, coming-of-age story about the bond of best friends, from the New York Times best-selling author of The Emperor's Children. Julia and Cassie have been friends since nursery school. They have shared everything, including their desire to escape the stifling limitations of their birthplace, the quiet town of Royston, Massachusetts. But as the two girls enter adolescence, their paths diverge and Cassie sets out on a journey that will put her life in danger and shatter her oldest friendship. Claire Messud, one of our finest novelists, is as accomplished at weaving a compelling fictional world as she is at asking the big questions: To what extent can we know ourselves and others? What are the stories we create to comprehend our lives and relationships? Brilliantly mixing fable and coming-of-age tale, The Burning Girl gets to the heart of these matters in an absolutely irresistible way.

  • Auteur:
    Ozeki, Ruth
    Sommaire:

    A brilliantly inventive new novel about loss, growing up, and learning to take charge of one's life, by the Booker Prize-finalist author of A Tale for the Time Being. Benny Oh is a fourteen year-old boy living in the Pacific Northwest who, shortly after his father dies, begins to hear voices. The voices belong to all the things around him, speaking. He doesn't understand what they are saying, but he can sense their emotional tone; many are angry and full of pain. Benny's voice-hearing is heightened because his depressed and lonely mother, Anabelle, is a hoarder. The first voices Benny hears belong to the things in Annabelle's growing hoard, but soon he is hearing voices not just at home, but on the street and at school. When he can't escape the voices, he starts to talk back to them. People begin to think he is mentally ill. Benny escapes to the public library whenever he can, and slowly a strange new world opens up to him as he gets to know its denizens. He meets and falls in love with a nineteen year-old freegan installation artist named 'The Aleph,' who introduces him to the 'Bottleman,' an older, homeless, Slovenian poet in a wheelchair who also hears voices. Benny discovers there are special places in the Library, anomalous or paranormal locations where 'things' happen. As the novel unfolds, Benny's attempt to deal with the voices and figure out what is real escalates as his mother faces eviction and custody issues, as both struggle to remake themselves and find their own power and agency. With its blend of sympathetic characters, a strong forward-moving plot, and a vigorous engagement with everything from our attachment to material possessions to the climate crisis, The Book of Form and Emptiness is classic Ruth Ozeki--brilliant, playful, poignant, humane, and heartbreaking.

  • Auteur:
    Morrison, Toni
    Sommaire:

    Pecola Breedlove, a young eleven-year-old black girl, prays everyday for beauty. Mocked by other children for the dark skin, curly hair, and brown eyes that set her apart, she yearns for the blond hair and blue eyes that she believes will allow her to finally fit in. Yet as her dreams grow more fervent, her life slowly starts to disintegrate in the face of adversity and strife. A powerful examination of our obsession with beauty and conformity.

  • Auteur:
    Morrison, Toni
    Sommaire:

    The story of eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove, the tragic heroine of Toni Morrison's haunting first novel, grew out of her memory of a girlhood friend who wanted blue eyes. Shunned by the town's prosperous black families, as well as its white families, Pecola lives with her alcoholic father and embittered, overworked mother in a shabby two-room storefront that reeks of the hopeless destitution that overwhelms their lives. In awe of her clean well-groomed schoolmates, and certain of her own intense ugliness, Pecola tries to make herself disappear as she wishes fervently, desperately for the blue eyes of a white girl.

  • Auteur:
    Hammonds Reed, Christina
    Sommaire:

    A New York Times bestseller "Should be required reading in every classroom." —Nic Stone, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Dear Martin "A true love letter to Los Angeles." —Brandy Colbert, award-winning author of Little & Lion "A brilliantly poetic take on one of the most defining moments in Black American history." —Tiffany D. Jackson, author of Grown and Monday's Not Coming Perfect for fans of The Hate U Give , this unforgettable coming-of-age debut novel explores issues of race, class, and violence through the eyes of a wealthy black teenager whose family gets caught in the vortex of the 1992 Rodney King Riots. Los Angeles, 1992 Ashley Bennett and her friends are living the charmed life. It's the end of senior year and they're spending more time at the beach than in the classroom. They can already feel the sunny days and endless possibilities of summer. Everything changes one afternoon in April, when four LAPD officers are acquitted after beating a black man named Rodney King half to death. Suddenly, Ashley's not just one of the girls. She's one of the black kids. As violent protests engulf LA and the city burns, Ashley tries to continue on as if life were normal. Even as her self-destructive sister gets dangerously involved in the riots. Even as the model black family façade her wealthy and prominent parents have built starts to crumble. Even as her best friends help spread a rumor that could completely derail the future of her classmate and fellow black kid, LaShawn Johnson. With her world splintering around her, Ashley, along with the rest of LA, is left to question who is the us ? And who is the them ?

  • Auteur:
    Atta, Dean
    Sommaire:

    Michael is a mixed-race gay teen growing up in London. All his life, he's navigated what it means to be Greek-Cypriot and Jamaican, but never quite feeling Greek or Black enough. As he gets older, Michael's coming out is only the start of learning who he is and where he fits in. When he discovers the Drag Society, he finally finds where he belongs, and the Black Flamingo is born.

  • Auteur:
    Woodburn, Dallas
    Sommaire:

    Teenager Tegan Rossi finds herself on Hawaii's Big Island, with no idea how she got there. Her best friend there, Kai, promises to help figure out what's going on, but answers lead to more questions.

  • Auteur:
    Kingsolver, Barbara
    Sommaire:

    When Taylor Greer hits the road she has no real destination, only to get as far from Kentucky as possible. By the time she ends up in Arizona, she has inherited a three-year-old Cherokee girl from an Indian woman she met in a bar.

  • Auteur:
    Doig, Ivan
    Sommaire:

    Tom Harry and his son Rusty live alone and run a bar in a small Montana town in the early 1960s. Their lives are upended when a woman from Tom's past and her beatnik daughter breeze into town.

  • Auteur:
    Coady, Lynn
    Sommaire:

    From bestselling novelist Lynn Coady comes an unforgettable, unflinching story of a life gone wrong.

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