Showing results by publisher "Tantor Audio" in Coming of Age

Michael Chabon masterfully renders the funny, tender, and captivating first-person narrative of Art Bechstein, whose confusion and heartache echo the tones of literary forebears like The Catcher in the Rye's Holden Caulfield and The Great Gatsby's Nick Carraway. The Mysteries of Pittsburgh incontrovertibly established Chabon as a powerful force in contemporary fiction, even before his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. An unforgettable story of coming of age in America, it is also an essential milestone in American fiction.

A young royal from the far north, is sent south for a political marriage in an empire reminiscent of imperial China. Her brothers are dead, her armies and their war mammoths long defeated and caged behind their borders. Alone and sometimes reviled, she must choose her allies carefully. Rabbit, a handmaiden, sold by her parents to the palace for the lack of five baskets of dye, befriends the emperor's lonely new wife and gets more than she bargained for.

His world was water and rhythm. Hard work and drive kept Royal O'Connell one step ahead of his competition. His spot on the swim team, keeping his scholarship, was the only plan that mattered. His world was ebony and ivory. Natural talent and ambition set Camden Morgan apart from the other music majors. His dedication scored him a full ride. Normally, their paths would have never crossed...but when Royal meets his best friend's new roommate, his big plan and Camden's controlled environment faces a variable that could destroy it all: attraction.

For 26-year-old Dylan Hopkins, the answer is easy. He's become no one. Memories of the happier times are all he has left, as he finds himself meandering numbly through his now dull life. Though he cares about his work and family dearly, he has yet to let himself find love again. Afraid of letting go of what he once had, Dylan chooses to keep his heart buried, where it belongs, having died a long time ago.

City girl Luce May's first year out of high school has been the worst. When she escapes her turbulent life in Sydney to start over at a university in the middle of nowhere, the last thing she wants is anyone in her new life to know of her past. Especially that to escape her chaotic, alcoholic mother, Luce also had to abandon her teenage sister. As Luce slowly starts to find another version of herself in this place, she also finds a new family in her eclectic group of friends.

As an only son, Kiran has obligations - to excel in his studies, to honor the deities, to find a nice Indian girl, and, above all, to make his mother and father proud - standard stuff for a boy of his background. If only Kiran had anything in common with the other Indian kids besides the color of his skin. They reject him at every turn, and his cretinous public schoolmates are no better. Cincinnati in the early 1990s isn't exactly a hotbed of cultural diversity, and Kiran's not-so-well-kept secrets don't endear him to any group.

The members of an elite girls swim team are the reigning queens at their South African boarding school. And then Italian student Fiamma Coronna joins their ranks. Beautiful, athletic, and suddenly commanding all the coach's attention, Fiamma is the envy of every girl on the team—until the summer she walks into the rural grasslands surrounding the school and disappears.

When Eli Harpo was four, he underwent emergency open-heart surgery, flatlined on the operating table, and for a brief time, went to heaven and met Jesus. Or at least that's what his father, a loving but devout Baptist minister, has raised him to believe. Nine years later, Eli isn't so sure. His rounds with his father to evangelize at hospices and sell his father's self-published book, Heaven or Bust!, feel inauthentic and strange, especially now that he's started having sex dreams about Jesus.

An honest story about recovery and coping with both past and present, framed by the meteoric rise and fall of the band Nirvana and the wide-reaching scope of the #metoo movement, Nirvana is Here explores issues of identity, race, sex, and family with both poignancy and unexpected humor. Deftly told intertwining stories with rich, real characters are reminiscent of the sensuality and haunting nostalgia of Andre Aciman's Call Me By Your Name blended with the raw emotion of Kurt Cobain's lyrics.

Farah moves into Liberty House - an arcadia, a community in harmony with nature - at the tender age of six, with her family. The commune's spiritual leader, Arcady, preaches equality, non-violence, anti-speciesism, free love, and uninhibited desire for all. At 15, Farah learns she is intersex, and begins to go beyond the confines of gender, as she explores the arc of her own desires. What, Farah asks, is a man or a woman? What does it mean to be part of a community? What is utopia when there are refugees nearby seeking shelter who cannot enter?

Jade Brown, a twenty-four-year-old first-generation Jamaican woman living in Toronto, must find a way to pick up the pieces and discover who she is following the mysterious death of her twin sister. Grappling with her grief, Jade seeks solace in lovers and friends during an array of hilarious and heartbreaking adventures. As she investigates some of life's most frustrating paradoxes, she holds tight to old friends and her ex-girlfriend, lifelines between past and present.

Vulgarian Rhapsody immerses listeners in a fading bohemia of queer dive bars, drag clubs, and countercultural cafes. The book's narrator (a longtime frenemy of Harris who's every bit as snarky and annoying as he is) tells the story with sadistic relish and an ironist's eye for the absurd. Anyone feeling sickly from too many uplifting stories of personal empowerment, precious coming-of-age tales, or sugarcoated romances will find the perfect antidote in this hilariously acidic comedy of manners.

Meet the hapless Jeremy: a man in his late 50s, he scrapes together a living in Paris by writing soft-core pornography under the saucy guise of "Nathalie Cray". When his all-but-estranged sister tells him their father is on his deathbed, Jeremy reluctantly travels back to his parental home in the depths of the English countryside. Confronted with a life that he had always been eager to escape, his return marks the start of an emotionally fraught journey into the family's checkered past.

Ray Shepard is a wealthy architect who has mystified his friends by marrying Evelyn, a woman who works at a nail salon. Evelyn, in turn, hides a secret past about her former life in the circus, her ex-husband's mysterious death, and the colorful tattoos she carefully conceals under her clothes. When Evelyn starts to cave under the pressure of living in Ray's rarified world, she suggests they take in Ingrid, a 16-year-old girl with blue hair, a pet iguana, and no place to stay for the summer.