Five Coming-of-Age Novels I’ve Read

Coming of age is a common theme in fiction with characters growing into maturity, or not, as their creators develop them, but in some novels it’s more dominant. Below are five that see young people growing into themselves, some facing adversity, others surprised by life, all with links to my reviews.

In The Party, Tessa Hadley’s first novella, Moira’s an art student, more worldly than her clever but naive younger sister Evelyn. When they’re invited to a house in a wealthy area of Bristol by a man they meet at a party, Moira sees an opportunity overcoming Evelyn’s reluctance. Hadley packs a lot into this brief story, choosing her words carefully and conveying a great deal in a few sentences. Moira and Evelyn are eager for life, capable of writing off their experience with the depraved Sinden as a drunken mistake from which they emerge wiser, more the women they aspire to be.  I’ve had mixed experiences with Hadley’s fiction but this shorter length suits her writing well.

Vendela Vida’s We Run the Tides follows four friends through the summer which will mark them for life. One day in 1984, on their way to school, they spot a man in a white car, a stranger who Maria Fabiola says is touching himself while watching them. Eulabee sees no such thing and finds herself ostracised. Then Maria Fabiola disappears, apparently kidnapped. By the end of the summer, Eulabee will have reassessed her friendship with Maria Fabiola but another disappearance will ensure that this summer casts a darker shadow on all their lives. Vida narrates this absorbing coming-of-age tale through Eulabee’s voice, smartly capturing the heady intensity of adolescent girls’ friendship.

Niall Williams’s This is Happiness winds back and forth over a single memorable summer which sees the electrification of a small town on the west coast of Ireland. Seventy-five-year-old Noe remembers those long, bright days in 1958 when he was seventeen and Faha stood on the cusp of change, telling a poignant story of love, redemption and the secret of happiness. Williams knows how to spin a yarn, expertly weaving a glorious sunlit tapestry of a community about to plant its feet in the twentieth-century fifty years into it. His novel is packed with stories and peopled with engaging characters, not least Noe and Christy, the man who becomes his friend. Given my liking for spare, crisp writing, Williams’s flowery style took some getting used to, but I came to love this novel.

Nanae Aoyama’s A Perfect Day to Be Alone spans a year which twenty-year-old Chizu spends with an elderly relative when her mother decides to take part in a Chinese teacher exchange. Ginko lives on the outskirts of Tokyo, widowed early and used to the family sending young people to her. Chizu presents herself to the quiet, seventy-one-year-old who answers the door with no introduction other than a phone call from her mother. Over the year that follows, Chizu breaks up with her sort of boyfriend, has her heart broken and comes to understand that Ginko’s life is not as tedious as she might have thought. Nothing much happens in Aoyama’s understated novella narrated in Chizu’s laconic, deadpan voice but her protagonist changes a great deal, no longer the dismissive, resentful young woman who first knocked on Ginko’s door.

Spanning a decade in Nigeria beginning in 2006, Chukwuebuka Ibeh’s Blessings is a poignant coming-of-age story in which a boy struggles to keep his sexuality under wraps in a deeply homophobic society. Obiefuna is enrolled in a seminary when his father catches him with a boy, his mother’s illness kept from him for the three years he spends there. At university, he falls deeply in love with an older man just before Nigeria enacts laws so draconian gay men begin locking themselves into marriage. Ibeh delivers his story in beautifully understated prose, drawing Obiefuna with compassion and sensitivity.

Any coming-of-age fiction you’d like to suggest?

If you’d like to explore more posts like this, you can find them here.